Senior Computer Vision Engineer, Face Tracking

We are looking for a Senior Computer Vision Engineer, Face Tracking to join our Perception team in Helsinki. Our display draws a 3D image onto a transparent surface, exactly where your eyes are and where they are about to be, hundreds of times a second. The face tracker is what makes that possible, and there is no physical mirror to fall back on: the software has to get it right, per pixel, in real time. It is one of the problems that decides whether the whole product works.

WHY DISTANCE?

At Distance Technologies, the problem we're solving is simple to state and hard to solve: the amount of data in the world is endless, but human capacity is not. We are building a fundamentally new perception layer between humans and machines, transforming transparent surfaces into interfaces unlike the world has ever seen. Think of the windscreen of a car, the visor of a helmet, or a sight device, each becoming a new front-end for AI. The way we turn bits and atoms into expanded human perception is protected by over 50 granted international patent families. We build it for two demanding worlds: defense and automotive. And we build it from a single foundation fusing software, hardware and computational optics.

There are over 50 of us today, with decade-long experience building world's best products, optics, and open-source operating systems. We partner and build with globally leading companies like KIA, FORVIA HELLA, Supacat, and Galvion, and we were Google Ventures' first investment in Finland. What we're building is hard, and will fundamentally change how we operate and see the world, and that's exactly why we seek exceptional people who enjoy building things never seen before.

THE ROLE

You will work on the face tracker at the core of our Lightfield HUD, as a peer to the engineer who owns it. The two of you split the work by where each of you is strongest. Your focus is making the tracking better, measured properly, across several fronts.

Your core responsibilities include:

• Face tracking: detecting where the user’s eyes are with millimeter level accuracy

• Pose prediction: rendering to where the eyes will be, not where the camera last saw them.

• Depth estimation from stereo.

• Detection robustness: staying operational also in challenging conditions (e.g., strong sunlight, occlusion, partial faces).

• Content stability: keeping the image locked in place as the head moves, in software rather than with mirrors.

• Noise and jitter filtering: real motion preserved, noise and jitter filtered out

• Real-time performance: holding all of it live, on the order of hundreds of updates a second.

You will also work with the owner of our quality measurements on end-to-end quality, review pull requests and reports, and be the senior technical point of contact for partner and customer questions in this area.

WHAT'S IN IT FOR YOU?

• A problem that decides the product. The face tracker makes or breaks the quality of the experience. Few algorithmic problems sit this close to whether a product works at all.

• Work that can save lives. Once this is in vehicles, putting the right information in the driver's line of sight without pulling their eyes off the road has real safety value.

• Genuinely new ground. Solving this in software rather than with mirrors is a frontier very few people are working on, in a core area of Distance's own technology.

• Credit and reward for what you invent. Patented inventions are publicly credited to their inventors, and Distance pays invention awards.

OUR EXPECTATIONS

You are a senior engineer who runs your own work, takes on the roadmap, and can explain the technical picture to partners and customers when it is needed. You work scientifically, backing what you build with measurement.

We expect a strong grounding in:

• Production-quality C++

• Real-time computer vision

• Face, hand, or body landmark models, or developing machine learning (ML) models for other 2D feature tracking

• State estimation and filtering (e.g. EKF)

• Multi-view geometry

• Geometry-constrained optimization problems

A plus, though not expected: automotive driver monitoring, eye tracking, autostereoscopic displays, AR/VR composition and OpenXR, embedded, SOC or NPU deployment, and safety-critical systems.

This role is based at our Helsinki HQ and is mostly onsite, since the work happens at the physical hardware. Strong English is essential, as some of the communication with partners and customers runs through you as the senior expert. Finnish is not required. We support relocation for the right person.

DID WE GET YOU INTERESTED?

Apply via the application form! Our recruitment process includes 2-3 discussions with the team. If you want to learn more about the position, reach out to our recruiter, Joel Kinnunen, at joel@distance.tech. Kindly note that, for data privacy reasons, we are not able to process applications sent via email.