Perception Engineer - Apprentice

About the role

As a Perception Engineering Intern / Apprentice at Origin (Formerly 10xConstruction), you will help our autonomous drywall-finishing robots "see" the job-site. You'll design and deploy perception pipelines—camera + LiDAR fusion, deep-learning vision models, and point-cloud geometry—to give the robot the awareness it needs.

Key Responsibilities

• Build ROS 2 nodes for 3-D point-cloud ingestion, filtering, voxelisation and wall-plane extraction (PCL / Open3D).
• Train and integrate CNN / Transformer models for surface-defect detection and semantic segmentation.
• Implement RANSAC-based pose, plane and key-point estimation; refine with ICP or Kalman/EKF loops.
• Fuse LiDAR, depth camera, IMU and wheel odometry data for robust SLAM and obstacle avoidance.
• Optimize and benchmark models on Jetson-class edge devices with TensorRT / ONNX Runtime.
• Collect, label and augment real & synthetic datasets; automate experiment tracking (Weights & Biases, MLflow).

Collaborate with manipulation, navigation and cloud teams to ship end-to-end, production-ready perception stacks.

Requirements

• Solid grasp of linear algebra, probability and geometry; coursework or projects in CV or robotics perception.
• Proficient in Python 3.x and C++17/20; comfortable with git and CI workflows.

Experience with ROS 2 (rclcpp / rclpy) and custom message / launch setups.

• Familiarity with deep-learning vision (PyTorch or TensorFlow)—classification, detection or segmentation.
• Hands-on work with point-cloud processing (PCL, Open3D); know when to apply voxel grids, KD-trees, RANSAC or ICP.
• Bonus: exposure to camera–LiDAR calibration, or real-time optimization libraries (Ceres, GTSAM).

Preferred Skills:

• Python 3.x
• C++17/20
• ROS 2
• PyTorch
• Open3D
• RANSAC

Benefits

For apprentice/Intern :

This is a six-month contract-to-hire position, with potential for longer-term opportunities depending on your contributions and interests. We’re excited to work with motivated individuals who are eager to support real-world robot development and grow alongside us.