Principal Sensor Engineer

About the role

Agile Minds Africa is seeking a Principal Sensor Engineer to lead the development of a production‑grade multi‑modal sensing layer that combines wide‑area WiFi CSI, mmWave radar and thermal infrared. The role is hands‑on and focuses on turning existing prototypes and open‑source components into a deployable system that can detect theft in real‑world environments.

Key responsibilities

• Integrate commercial mmWave radar hardware, capture raw ADC data and build DSP pipelines (Range‑Doppler‑Azimuth, CFAR, tracking).
• Design, train and deploy CNN‑based radar classifiers achieving 90%+ accuracy on weapon detection, using proper subject‑wise validation.
• Deploy inference pipelines on edge AI compute platforms, ensuring sub‑50 ms latency and reliable autonomous boot.
• Fuse radar outputs with WiFi CSI mesh and thermal IR data, creating aggregation‑layer fusion logic.
• Mount, calibrate and validate complete sensor stacks in pilot sites, reducing false positives to under 0.5 per hour.
• Act as technical escalation point for clients, explaining detection behaviour and false positives to non‑technical stakeholders.

Required profile

• 5+ years of production‑level RF or radar engineering experience (automotive, defense, or industrial mmWave).
• Hands‑on experience with commercial mmWave radar SDKs and strong DSP implementation skills.
• Modern machine‑learning deployment expertise (PyTorch, ONNX, CNN architectures) on embedded/edge platforms.
• Proven ability to ship hardware‑software systems into commercial deployments.
• Strong systems‑level debugging across hardware and software stacks and high ownership mindset.

Required skills

• mmWave radar integration
• Digital signal processing (DSP)
• Range‑Doppler‑Azimuth processing, CFAR, tracking algorithms
• CNN classifier development
• PyTorch and ONNX
• Embedded and edge AI deployment
• WiFi CSI sensing
• Thermal infrared sensing
• RF engineering