Embedded System Lead Engineer @Pelagon (backed by Hexa)

Overview

The sea is the physical layer of the economy—the conduit for our energy, communications, and trade. Pelagon is building the answer. 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. Pelagon aims to lead the way in autonomous marine protection—from detection to interception—partnering with navies, primes, and neo-primes, while also operating its own fleet as a service.

Pelagon is backed by Hexa, a pioneer startup studio in Europe, with a portfolio including Front, Aircall, and Spendesk, combining €230m+ ARR and €750m raised.

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

• Persistence with a finite power budget. Endurance is essential for a surveillance node — squeezing weeks of useful operation out of a sealed, ship‑deployable platform is a relentless optimization across power, compute, and duty‑cycling.
• Reliability with no one to fix it. A system at sea must fail safe and recover on its own. There is no field technician at 30 nautical miles offshore in a 2 m swell.
• Running real AI at the edge, on almost no power. In‑house models must run inference on‑device, in real time, on platforms with a razor‑thin energy budget — then sense, sleep, and wake to stretch endurance. Getting high‑performance ML to live within milliwatts is essential.
• Sensing in a hostile medium. The ocean presents pressure, corrosion, biofouling, acoustic noise, and intermittent comms — and the hardware must keep sensing and computing through all of it.
• Speed without fragility. Move quickly toward sea trials, but avoid designs that break and fail to generate data.

Why join now

• Founding ownership. You’ll be among the first engineers and help define the technical foundation of the company. Meaningful equity comes with that.
• A mission with weight. Hardware that protects critical infrastructure and Europe’s maritime space.
• Real things, in the real ocean, fast. See your work in the water within weeks, not years.
• AI‑first, at the edge, in the real world. Train our own models and run them where it matters: in the water, on the device.
• A sovereign, European deeptech at the inflection point of a market with NATO and EU policy momentum.

Who we’re looking for

You are a sharp, senior builder who wants to own a problem, not be handed a ticket.

• 5+ years building real, shipping hardware — embedded systems that are efficient, robust, and survive the real world.
• Direct experience building drones or autonomous systems (e.g., from drone companies, automotive/autonomous vehicles, or marine autonomy).
• Deep, hands‑on command of the full embedded stack: electronics design, power systems, motor/actuator control, sensor integration, microcontrollers and embedded Linux, and firmware close to the metal.
• Comfort with autopilot/flight‑controller ecosystems (Pixhawk, ArduPilot/ArduSub/PX4 or equivalent) and real‑time control realities.
• Experience deploying AI/ML models at the edge — embedded inference, accelerators (GPU/NPU/TPU‑class), model quantization and optimization, and the power‑versus‑performance tradeoffs that come with it.
• A bias toward action: prototype, test, break, iterate under tight deadlines with meaningful impact.
• Fluency operating in a fast, ambiguous, founding‑team environment where you define the process as much as you follow it.
• Bonus: mechanical/mechatronic breadth (hulls, sealing, thrust, as well as circuits); experience with subsea/marine hardware; comms in degraded/contested environments; CFD or hydrodynamics intuition; or taking a hardware product from zero to fielded at scale.