Principal Camera & Sensor Applications Engineer - Palo Alto, CA, United States
$180,000 - $270,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 4 September 2026 by the employer.
About the role
The Principal Camera & Sensor Applications Engineer serves as the technical front line between Mythic's silicon and customers, translating imaging, sensing, and embedded-AI use cases into system requirements and building demonstrations. This role focuses on identifying where Mythic technology adds value across automotive, robotics, medical, consumer, and industrial applications within camera systems.
What you'll do
- Lead technical engagements to understand customer imaging, sensing, and embedded-AI use cases, system architectures, and product constraints.
- Translate customer needs into measurable requirements for image quality, AI performance, latency, power, reliability, interfaces, and system cost.
- Define and develop customer demonstrations, evaluation kits, reference designs, and proof-of-concept systems integrating sensors with Mythic technology.
- Support customers through technical evaluation, system integration, troubleshooting, and design-in.
- Serve as the sensor and camera-system subject-matter expert, identifying where Mythic technology can add value.
- Translate system and customer requirements into MRDs, PRDs, functional specifications, and prioritized engineering requirements.
- Work closely with silicon, hardware, software, and AI teams to assess feasibility, identify capability gaps, and guide product-roadmap decisions.
- Define system-level validation plans and success criteria covering image quality, AI accuracy, latency, power, reliability, and overall customer experience.
What you'll need
- 10+ years in camera systems, imaging, or embedded vision, including senior technical or team leadership.
- Deep expertise across the imaging signal chain: image sensors, optics, ISP, tuning and calibration, and image-quality measurement.
- Demonstrated success taking camera or vision systems from architecture and prototype through validation and volume production.
- Strong customer-facing technical skills running evaluations, integration support, and troubleshooting with external engineering teams.
- Proven ability to author functional specifications, MRDs/PRDs, and prioritized requirements.
- Cross-functional fluency with silicon, hardware, firmware, software, and AI teams.
Nice to have
- Experience deploying vision models on embedded or specialized AI accelerators; familiarity with edge AI, SoC integration, or compute-in-memory architectures.
- Background spanning two or more of Automotive (ADAS/in-cabin), Robotics, Medical, Consumer, and Industrial imaging.
- Hands-on development of reference designs, evaluation kits, or proof-of-concept camera systems.
- Semiconductor-side experience with image sensors or ISP product definition.
Skills: customer engagements, imaging systems, sensor applications, embedded AI, reference designs, system integration
This role has been open 41 days — below the 44-day median for Applications FAE roles.
Applications FAE · AI ML Hardware
|
Open roles in category
99
|
Median days open
44 d
|
Median salary
$261k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Mythic | All employers we track in this specialty (99 roles · 19 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 1 | 99 |
| Median days open | 41 d | 44 d (−3 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $261k |
Skills observed across this category: customer engagements, imaging systems, sensor applications, embedded AI, reference designs, system integration
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 58 open roles · median 44 d
- AMD · 11 open roles · median 57 d
- Tenstorrent · 8 open roles · median 69 d
- NXP Semiconductors · 4 open roles · median 36 d
- Qualcomm · 3 open roles · median 83 d
- Microchip Technology · 2 open roles · median 27 d
How we counted: 99 open Applications FAE (AI ML Hardware) roles from 19 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 15 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there. Figures refresh nightly.