Embedded System Lead Engineer

Pelagon is building a foundational multimodal acoustic model for autonomous maritime protection (underwater and surface) in service of European sovereignty, deployed on a distributed, autonomous network of vectors (UUVs, buoys, sailbuoys, seabed sensors) to provide real-time understanding of underwater threats. The Embedded System Lead Engineer takes end-to-end technical ownership of the hardware, electronics, and embedded stack across a small family of autonomous maritime platforms that must persist at sea for long periods, sense their surroundings, run AI on-device, and report back, all on a tight energy budget. The role is full-time, on-site in Marseille or Paris, within a founding team reporting to the founders.

Responsibilities

Own common system architecture across the platforms (power, sensing, compute, communications); Select and integrate the edge-AI compute platform (processors and accelerators) that runs in-house detection models on-device; Electronics design and integration (power distribution, battery systems, motor/thruster control, sensor interfaces for acoustic, pressure, IMU, GNSS, AIS); Embedded software and autopilot stack, firmware, and low-level integration; Robustness and efficiency engineering (watertight integrity, power budgets and endurance, thermal behaviour, EMC, graceful failure modes); Hands-on bring-up and sea trials; Vendor and component decisions, and building test and manufacturing practices as the company scales from prototype to fielded units; Lead technical development from architecture and component selection through bring-up, integration, sea trials, and iteration; Set the engineering bar for the platforms team

Requirements

5+ years building real, shipping hardware, including embedded systems that had to be efficient, robust, and survive the real world; Direct experience building drones or autonomous systems (drone companies, automotive/autonomous vehicles, or marine autonomy); Deep, hands-on command of the full embedded stack: electronics design, power systems, motor/actuator control, sensor integration, microcontrollers and embedded Linux, and firmware close to the metal; Comfort with autopilot/flight-controller ecosystems (Pixhawk, ArduPilot/ArduSub/PX4 or equivalent) and real-time control; Experience deploying AI/ML models at the edge, including embedded inference, accelerators (GPU/NPU/TPU-class), model quantization and optimization, and power-versus-performance tradeoffs; A bias toward action: prototyping, testing, breaking, and iterating; Fluency working in a fast, ambiguous, founding-team environment

Nice to have

Mechanical/mechatronic breadth (hulls, sealing, thrust); Experience with subsea or marine hardware; Comms in degraded/contested environments; CFD or hydrodynamics intuition; Having taken a hardware product from zero to fielded at scale

Benefits

Founding ownership as one of the first engineers; Meaningful equity; Work on a mission protecting critical infrastructure and European maritime space; Rapid deployment of work into real-world sea trials