About Lodestar
Lodestar is the software-first space prime for the hardware abundant era. We believe the next generation of space systems will be defined not by launch, fuel, and batteries, but by software, compute, and autonomous effects.
Space is becoming an increasingly contested warfighting domain, with growing threats to the satellites and critical infrastructure underpinning modern life. Maintaining Western strategic advantage will require a new generation of space capabilities built for the speed, complexity and scale of future conflict.
Lodestar is addressing this challenge by building superintelligent spacecraft capable of operating autonomously in orbit. Combining our capabilities in advanced adversarial tracking & characterisation, onboard edge compute and autonomous effect delivery, our technology enables spacecraft to execute complex rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO), detect and classify objects, predict intent and respond to orbital threats - even in denied environments. By integrating sensing, reasoning and action into a single autonomous system, we aim to deliver decisive situational awareness and space superiority for defence and commercial operators.
Backed by elite deep-tech venture capital, international space agencies and government stakeholders, Lodestar is rapidly expanding its footprint across the U.S. Space Force, the Department of War, and major commercial satellite operators. We are a lean, high-autonomy team of engineers and operators building the space defense infrastructure of tomorrow.
Join us.
About the Job
As a Software Engineer II/III - Perception at Lodestar, you’ll be joining the perception and machine vision teams to rapidly grow our vision and perception models at MITHRIL’s center.
You'll help build and refine algorithms that detect, classify and understand unknown space targets in real time. Working alongside senior perception engineers, you'll combine computer vision, image processing and machine learning to develop the custom models that underpin autonomous decision-making in complex and uncertain space environments.
This is an mid-career role. We're looking for strong fundamentals and fast learning, and you'll be given real ownership early with the support to grow into it.
We proudly have an "extreme ownership" oriented engineering culture.
What You’ll Do
Contribute to the perception system at the core of Lodestar's autonomy software suite
Work through the full lifecycle of perception algorithms alongside senior engineers including literature review, training, evaluation, optimisation and deployment
Build on and optimise our existing models for edge computing, and develop new components with guidance from the perception leads
Help develop and test our methods for predicting the relative pose of dynamic space targets in harsh and unpredictable visual environments
Integrate perception models into mission simulation environments and real-time autonomy pipelines
Contribute to the design of realistic sensor models and digital twins to improve perception fidelity in mission scenarios
Maintain and extend our perception tooling, model training infrastructure, and evaluation frameworks
Collaborate across the autonomy, estimation, and mission software teams to support perception fidelity, performance, and scalability
Basic Qualifications
Solid software engineering skills in Python, and working proficiency in C++
Foundational DNN/ML knowledge and hands-on experience with computer vision or image processing libraries (e.g. OpenCV)
Bachelor's or Master's degree in AI/ML, Computer Science, Robotics, a related field, or equivalent experience
2-5 years of professional experience in machine learning, robotics, computer vision, or a related field. Internships, research placements, and substantial academic or personal projects all count
Demonstrated ability to take an ML model from training through to evaluation, in any setting — coursework, research, or industry
Broad understanding of modern…