Machine/Computer Vision Engineer

FeaturePrint | Zero Trust for Things™

Machine / Computer Vision Developer

We’re looking for curious people — people who see surfaces differently and build solutions nobody else thought to try. We don’t want people who think outside the box, rather those who don’t see a box to begin with.

ABOUT ALITHEON

Alitheon has created something that didn’t exist before: a way to give every physical object its own unique, immutable, permanent identity—using nothing more than a photograph.

Our patented FeaturePrint technology works like fingerprints for people, but for things. By reading the inherent micro-surface features of any object, we can register, identify, authenticate, and trace individual items at scale—without altering the product, disrupting the production line, or relying on tags, stickers, etchings, QR codes, blockchain, or any other proxy marker (visible or invisible).

We are not competing in an existing category. We are defining a new one.

Our technology enables 1-to-1, item-level serialization across industries where traceability, authenticity, and provenance aren’t just operational concerns—they’re existential ones: luxury goods, collectibles, healthcare, military, automotive, and aerospace.

WHY THIS ROLE EXISTS

FeaturePrint's breakthrough lies not just in the concept, but in the computer vision technology that makes it real. Every physical object has unique surface characteristics—micro-features invisible to the human eye—and extracting, encoding, and matching those features at scale demands world-class computer vision engineering.

We've built a system that reads surfaces the way experts read fingerprints. But reading them is only the beginning. Someone has to expand our models, optimize the extraction pipelines, refine our algorithms, handle edge cases across wildly different materials and lighting conditions, and continuously improve accuracy in production. That engineer is you—someone who understands both the academic foundation and the ruthless pragmatism of shipping vision systems that work in the real world, not just in the lab.

That's why we're looking for you: a computer vision engineer who can take our patented technology and make it better, faster, and more robust than anyone thought possible.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Develop and optimize core vision algorithms. Design and implement feature extraction, image processing, and matching pipelines that work across diverse materials, surface conditions, lighting environments, and product types. You'll work with raw images and transform them into the cryptographic signatures that authenticate physical objects.
• Continuously solve hard computer vision problems. Tackle challenges like scale invariance, rotation invariance, material variation, and real-time processing constraints. You'll write code that handles edge cases and fails gracefully when it should.
• Collaborate on product integration. Work with our product and hardware teams to understand deployment constraints—camera specs, lighting conditions, processing speed requirements—and solve vision solutions that actually work in customer environments, not just in notebooks.
• Drive technical innovation. Stay current with advances in computer vision, evaluate new approaches, and propose improvements to our algorithms and architecture.

WHO YOU ARE

FIRST: Creative thinking - You approach problems from unexpected angles. You’ve shipped something unconventional and it worked.

SECOND: Vision curiosity - You find the image pipeline genuinely fascinating — light, sensors, noise, and what gets lost in between.

THIRD: Maker instinct - You’d rather build a quick prototype than write a long proposal. Ideas become experiments fast.

You are an engineer with deep expertise in machine/computer vision and machine learning. Specifically, you bring:

• 7+ years of professional computer vision experience, with significant time building production systems (not just research prototypes). You've shipped vision code that runs in real environments and handles real-world data at scale.
• Strong foundation in core computer vision. You understand image processing, feature extraction, image matching, and traditional CV algorithms—and you know when to reach for classical methods.
• Proficiency in deep learning frameworks. You're comfortable training and optimizing neural networks. You understand transfer learning, and how to work with limited or imbalanced datasets.
• Software engineering rigor. You write your own C++ testable, maintainable code. You care about performance, can profile and optimize, and understand the difference between research code and production code. Speed and correctness both matter.
• Problem-solving instinct. When an algorithm works in the lab but fails in the field, you dig in and figure out why. You iterate, measure, and improve.
• Communication skills. You can explain your technical decisions to non-vision engineers and articulate trade-offs clearly.

WHY JOIN ALITHEON

• An amazing technical challenge. You're building something that barely existed before—a computer vision system that reads the world in a way that's never been done at this scale.
• Technology that works. FeaturePrint is patented and deployed. This isn't a research project or a proof-of-concept. Your code powers real authentication and traceability across industries that need it.
• High-impact applications. Your vision algorithms help prevent counterfeit drugs from reaching hospitals, authenticate aerospace parts that lives depend on, and secure supply chains across luxury goods and collectibles. The work is consequential.
• Sophisticated technical challenges. You'll work on hard problems: scaling to billions of items, handling material and environmental variation, optimizing for real-time performance, and improving robustness continuously.
• Autonomy and ownership. You'll own significant pieces of the vision pipeline. You're not in a massive org where your work gets reviewed for three months by multiple layers of people. You'll propose ideas, implement them, and see impact.

COMPENSATION & STRUCTURE

Compensation is commensurate with the experience and nature of this role. The package includes salary, equity, and amazing benefits.

This is an on-site position, in our office in Bellevue, WA. We can't support visa sponsorship or relocation.

Ready to turn your experience and expertise into the next chapter of your career?

Send your resume and a brief note about the industry problems you’ve spent your career solving to info@alitheon.com. We’d rather hear your war stories than read a cover letter.

Alitheon| alitheon.com |Fingerprints for Things™