Location: Fairport, NY – Hybrid | Employment Type: Full Time
About the Role
Owl Autonomous Imaging is seeking a Validation & Characterization Engineer to lead and support the validation, characterization, and performance evaluation of Owl’s advanced AI-powered thermal imaging systems and sensor technologies.
This role will be responsible for developing rigorous methods to measure and characterize product performance across a range of operating conditions and ensuring that products meet defined technical requirements and performance objectives. The engineer will work closely with hardware, sensor, firmware, software, systems, machine learning, and test engineering teams to translate product requirements into measurable performance criteria and generate the data necessary to validate Owl’s technology.
The ideal candidate is a highly analytical, hands-on engineer who is comfortable working with complex electro-optical systems, designing experiments, analyzing large data sets, troubleshooting unexpected results, and communicating technical findings clearly. This role is particularly well suited for someone who enjoys understanding why a system performs the way it does, not simply determining whether it passes or fails.
What You’ll Accomplish
- Establish reliable, repeatable, and scientifically sound validation methods.
- Generate high-quality data that provides clear insight into product performance.
- Establish meaningful performance baselines and identify sources of variation.
- Accurately characterize thermal imaging and sensing system performance across relevant operating conditions.
- Identify performance limitations and unexpected behaviors early in the product development process.
- Develop efficient tools and automated methods that improve the speed and consistency of validation.
- Translate complex data into clear engineering conclusions and actionable recommendations.
- Provide objective evidence that products meet defined requirements and performance objectives.
- Support engineering teams in identifying and resolving performance issues.
- Build and continuously improve Owl's validation and characterization capabilities as the company's products mature.
Role Level & Scope
- Individual contributor role
Essential Responsibilities
- Develop and execute comprehensive validation and characterization plans for thermal imaging sensors, cameras, and related products.
- Translate system and product requirements into measurable validation criteria, test methods, and performance metrics.
- Design experiments and characterization studies to evaluate system performance across operating conditions, configurations, and use cases.
- Characterize key performance parameters of thermal imaging and sensing systems, including accuracy, sensitivity, range, resolution, noise, stability, latency, and other applicable metrics.
- Develop repeatable methods for measuring and evaluating sensor and system performance.
- Establish baseline performance and statistical distributions for new products, components, and engineering builds.
- Evaluate product performance across temperature, environmental, optical, electrical, and other relevant operating conditions.
- Collect, process, analyze, and interpret large volumes of experimental sensor data.
- Develop scripts, tools, and automated workflows to support data collection, analysis, and characterization.
- Identify performance trends, anomalies, limitations, and sources of variation.
- Investigate unexpected characterization results and work with engineering teams to determine root causes.
- Support definition and refinement of product specifications and acceptance criteria based on empirical performance data.
- Develop and maintain validation procedures, characterization methodologies, data analysis tools, and technical documentation.
- Generate detailed engineering reports documenting test methodology, results, conclusions, and recommendations.
- Communicate technical findings to engineering teams and leadership and make data-driven recommendations.
- Support qualification, reliability, environmental, and field validation activities as required.
- Collaborate with Test Engineering to ensure appropriate test coverage and repeatability.
- Collaborate with Systems Engineering to ensure validation methods accurately represent intended product requirements and use cases.
- Support customer evaluations, field testing, demonstrations, and troubleshooting activities as needed.
- Contribute to continuous improvement of Owl’s validation, characterization, measurement, and data-analysis methodologies.
What We’re Looking For
Required
- Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Physics, Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
- 2+ years of experience in imaging validation, characterization, verification, test engineering, systems engineering, product development, or a related field.
- Experience designing and executing engineering experiments and structured test plans.
- Strong understanding of measurement principles, experimental methodology, and data analysis.
- Experience collecting, analyzing, and interpreting engineering test data.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to identify trends and determine potential sources of variation.
- Experience developing clear technical documentation and engineering reports.
- Ability to work hands-on with laboratory equipment, prototypes, sensors, and engineering test setups.
- Ability to troubleshoot complex technical problems involving multiple system components.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
- Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced, multidisciplinary engineering environment.
Preferred
- Experience with thermal imaging, infrared sensors, electro-optical systems, cameras, or image sensors.
- Experience characterizing sensor or imaging performance.
- Experience with radiometric or non-radiometric thermal imaging systems.
- Experience developing measurement methodologies for imaging or sensing systems.
- Experience with optical testing, calibration, radiometry, or photonics.
- Experience with automated data acquisition systems and laboratory instrumentation.
- Experience with oscilloscopes, multimeters, power supplies, electronic loads, data acquisition equipment, or other laboratory instrumentation.
- Strong programming experience in Python, MATLAB, or a similar technical computing language.
- Experience using Python or similar tools for data analysis, visualization, and automated test/measurement.
- Experience with statistical analysis, design of experiments (DOE), uncertainty analysis, or statistical process analysis.
- Experience working with large sensor or image datasets.
- Experience with image processing or computer vision.
- Experience with embedded systems, firmware, or hardware/software integration.
- Experience with automotive, ADAS, autonomous vehicles, robotics, drones, or other sensing applications.
- Experience with reliability, qualification, or environmental testing.
- Familiarity with formal requirements management and verification/validation processes.
- Experience working within a quality management system or other controlled engineering environment.
Compensation Range
$130k – $160k annually, based on experience, qualifications, and geographic location, plus applicable benefits.
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