Signal Processing Engineer – Maritime Infrastructure (US, Remote + Quarterly Seattle Visits)
Are you the kind of Signal Processing Engineer who likes sitting right at the boundary between hard physics, messy real‑world signals, and cutting‑edge AI?
This is a chance to join a very small, well‑funded US stealth startup building frontier undersea / maritime infrastructure – think national‑scale security and next‑generation subsea telecom. You’ll be one of the first hires (headcount <10), working directly with the CTO (ex‑Meta / security / systems) and CEO (deep fiber/optics background), owning the DSP stack end‑to‑end.
The environment is early‑stage and highly technical: lots of unknowns, lots of experimentation, and very high expectations. If you enjoy hacking on real signals, shaping architectures, and using modern AI tools as part of your workflow, this will feel like home.
What you’ll be doing:
- Designing and building digital signal processing (DSP) pipelines for high‑volume data coming from distributed maritime / fiber‑based sensing systems
- Taking raw, noisy, physical signals all the way through decoding, denoising, feature extraction, and into robust, decision‑useful outputs
- Working closely with the CEO on fiber/optics and DAS/SOP concepts, and with the CTO on integrating your work into the broader hardware/software stack
- Collaborating with an external ML team so your DSP outputs feed scalable training and inference workflows
- Helping shape lab and remote experimentation flows – data capture, replay harnesses, automated test runs, configuration management
- Documenting algorithms, trade‑offs, and system behavior so the platform can scale beyond initial prototypes
What we’re looking for:
- Strong, hands‑on experience with digital signal processing (DSP) as a core part of your recent work
- Solid foundation in physics and/or mathematics (e.g. EE, applied physics, applied math) and comfortable reasoning from first principles
- Proven experience working with high‑volume data and the practicalities that come with it (throughput, performance, data handling, debugging at scale)
- A genuine hacker mentality – you like ambiguous, hard problems, moving quickly, and wiring up real lab systems, not just polishing slide decks
- You already use modern AI tools (LLMs, code assistants, etc.) in your day‑to‑day work and can explain how you integrate and debug them
- US citizen, comfortable working in a defence‑adjacent / national‑security context
Nice to have (but not required):
- Experience with FPGAs, GPUs, or other accelerators for DSP workloads
- Background in optical / fiber sensing – especially DAS (Distributed Acoustic Sensing) or SOP (State of Polarization)
- Experience in domains like seismology, geophysical measurement, or other large‑scale physical sensing systems
Location & setup:
- US‑based, primarily remote
- Occasional travel to the Seattle area lab (roughly once per quarter, give or take) for on‑site experiments and deep‑dive working sessions with the team
If you’re a Signal Processing Engineer who wants to work on real hardware, real physics, and real national‑scale problems – while having serious influence over the direction of the system – this is worth a conversation.
