Venture-backed defense tech company designing and manufacturing combat-tested unmanned aircraft at scale is hiring a Perception Lead to own the full perception stack across all vehicle platforms — detection, recognition, and image-space target tracking from sensor to the track consumed by state estimation and guidance. Player-coach role: lead and grow a small perception team while still writing production code. Owns the architecture and roadmap, drives the transition from classical CV to learned models as flight data justifies it (with a deterministic fallback), and is accountable for performance under degraded conditions — long standoff, low light/thermal, cluttered land and maritime backgrounds, occlusion, and loss of comms. Also owns deployment to constrained onboard compute within end-to-end latency budgets.