Breakout Ventures · 15 hours ago
Perception Engineer (Member of the Technical Staff)
Cambridge, MA
Full-time
Onsite
Entry, Mid, Senior LevelBreakout Ventures is associated with Transfyr Bio, a company focused on building physical AI for science. The Perception Engineer will design and deploy perception systems to interpret real-world scientific work, ensuring systems function effectively in dynamic laboratory environments.
Advanced MaterialsEnergyFinancial ServicesLife ScienceVenture Capital
Responsibilities
Capture the Unspoken: Design perception systems that make real-world scientific execution legible, translating physical actions and system state into structured, reusable data
Give Our AI Models “Sight”: Build and deploy computer vision systems that operate reliably in live laboratory environments, tracking people, objects, instruments, and automation under real-world variability
Build the Pipeline: Develop multimodal perception pipelines that integrate video with audio, sensor data, metadata, and experimental context, in close partnership with software and AI/ML engineers
The Real World Is Right (Your Model Is Incomplete): Work directly alongside scientists and operators in our Cambridge-based laboratory and at customer sites, observing failure modes firsthand and iterating until systems are robust to changing conditions (lighting, layouts, equipment, etc)
Scale the Science: Enable transferable science and future automation by building a physical AI layer that supports workflows generalizing across labs, teams, and geographies. Allow scientists to focus on exploration rather than bookkeeping by enabling truly passive information capture
Enable the Robot Future: Enable generalizable automation in scientific settings by building a robust physical AI layer that understands the actions that are taken to achieve experimental outcomes
Qualification
Required
High agency. You don't wait for ideal data or perfect specs. You take ownership of problems, identify what needs to be done, and push work forward
Biased toward action. You value momentum, can move quickly without being careless, and know when to trade elegance for progress
Successful in ambiguity. You can make progress on long-tail problems where ground truth is incomplete and success criteria evolve
Thoughtful. You understand tradeoffs between model complexity, reliability, latency, and operational burden, and choose deliberately
Clear, direct communicator. You close loops, surface issues early, and work effectively with colleagues who may not share your technical background
Intense. You care deeply about the mission, are willing to work hard when it matters, and take pride in helping a small team do outsized work
Computer Vision: You have deep experience in computer vision (Object Detection & Tracking, Pose Estimation, Activity Recognition, Video Understanding) and you know how to make these models work in the messy, high-stakes environments
Modern VLMs: New advances come out daily - you track the ecosystem and are excited about bringing new AI tools and systems into your problem solving & pipelines - everything from VLMs and VLAs to that new long video understanding model that might just be SOTA for the task
Modern ML Stack: You're fluent in Python and PyTorch. You've deployed models to the cloud (AWS/GCP) and, ideally, have experience with edge deployment for real-time inference using frameworks like TFLite and TensorRT
Engineering Rigor: You can build a functional prototype in a weekend, but you also understand how to take prototypes to production. There's a time and place for both and you can distinguish between them
Preferred
A passion for and experience in science
A passion for and experience with AI
Demonstrated experience working in fast-moving/ambiguous environments (like startups!)
Benefits
Low/no-cost health insurance options
HSA
401K with matching
Lunch subsidy
Company
Breakout Ventures
Breakout Ventures is an early stage fund that backs bold scientist entrepreneurs.
Founded in 2016
2-10 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageTotal Funding
unknown2018-01-01Seed
Leadership Team
Dana Watt
Partner
Julia Moore
Managing Partner
Recent News
2025-04-16
2025-04-16
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