Embedded System Lead Engineer

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About the role

Pelagon - Autonomous Maritime ISR Full-time · On-site (Marseille or Paris) · Founding team · Reports to founders The sea is the physical layer of the economy—the conduit for our energy, communications, and trade. It is also Europe’s exposed flank. Pelagon is building the answer. Founded by Aymeric (serial deeptech entrepreneur; founded & exited Scortex, Leading AI solution for manufacturing quality) and Gauthier (Navy officer and McKinsey), Pelagon is building a foundational multimodal acoustic model for autonomous maritime protection (underwater and surface) in service of European sovereignty. It will be deployed on a distributed, autonomous network of vectors (UUVs, buoys, sailbuoys, seabed…) to provide real-time understanding of underwater threats. France and Europe have world-class acoustic engineers and a long history in underwater warfare. By bridging this expertise with modern physical-AI strategies (as seen in autonomous driving and robotics). Europe is still missing it’s naval NeoPrime, Pelagon aims to become to lead the way in autonomous marine protection—from detection to interception—partnering with leading navies, primes, and neo-primes, while also operating its own fleet as a service. Pelagon is backed by Hexa , the pioneer startup studio in Europe, which has launched 35+ companies, including unicorns like Front, Aircall, and Spendesk, combining €230m+ ARR and €750m raised. The role As Embedded System Lead Engineer , you take end-to-end technical ownership of the hardware, electronics, and embedded stack across a small family of autonomous maritime platforms, some operating on the surface, some beneath it. What they share matters more than what sets them apart: each must persist at sea for long stretches, sense its surroundings, run our AI on-device, and report back intelligently — all while surviving a brutal environment on a very tight energy budget. You will lead their technical development , from architecture and component selection through bring-up, integration, sea trials, and iteration. You'll set the engineering bar for the platforms team and shape how we build for years to come. These platforms exist to carry one thing into the water: our AI. Pelagon trains high-performance detection models in-house on its own stack, and those models have to run on-device, at the edge , on a razor-thin power budget — then push results back to our operations center. Designing the compute-and-power architecture that makes this possible is the heart of the role. The mandate is simple and uncompromising: get reliable hardware in the water fast, and start collecting data. Every week of persistent at-sea operation compounds. The hardware is the gate to all of it. What you'll own • Common system architecture across the platforms: power, sensing, compute, and communications. • The edge-AI compute platform — selecting and integrating the processors and accelerators that run our in-house detection models on-device, and extracting maximum inference from every milliwatt. • Electronics design and integration — power distribution, battery systems, motor/thruster control, sensor interfaces (acoustic, pressure, IMU, GNSS, AIS). • The embedded software and autopilot stack, firmware, and the low-level glue that makes autonomy reliable in a brutal, wet, salty environment. • Robustness and efficiency engineering: watertight integrity, power budgets and endurance, thermal behaviour, EMC, and graceful failure modes far from shore. • Hands-on bring-up and sea trials — you'll be on the dock and on the boat, not just at the bench. • Vendor and component decisions, and the build-up of our test and manufacturing practices as we scale from prototype to fielded units. The hard problems you'll be solving These are genuinely difficult, and that'

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