←Ithacus Careers · 2 Open Roles
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Build what nobody
has built.

Ithacus is building a new class of acoustic sensing for security. Our networks listen for vehicles, intruders, drones, and other threats, then detect, classify, and track them in real time. The largest acoustic sensing networks in the world today operate at 104 sensors. We build ours for 106–108. Nothing at that scale exists, so we design many elements from first principles.

Sound is the most underused signal in security. Every vehicle, person, and drone makes noise, and acoustic sensors pick it up where cameras are blind, radar is too costly, and RF detection misses anything that isn’t transmitting. We are solving the hard part: making that sensing cheap, accurate, and dense enough to cover entire sites and cities. We work at the edge of what is technically possible across energy, signals, and acoustics.

Founded by engineers from Harvard, Imperial, and Citadel, and backed by investors from the infrastructure and finance worlds, we are deploying with early customers and scaling across Europe. We are building universal sensing technology. The same network protects airports, power plants, stadiums, prisons, ports, borders, and private property: anywhere the perimeter is too large or the threats too varied for legacy systems to cover affordably.

London · In person · Skilled Worker sponsorship available
Open Roles

The Role

This is primarily a firmware development role. You will own the firmware of our acoustic sensor nodes: ultra low power, field-hardened devices performing real-time multi-channel audio capture, on-device inference, and long-range radio communication.

Code you write this month will run on deployed devices next month.

Main Responsibilities

  • Develop and own firmware for our acoustic sensor nodes: real-time multi-channel audio capture, buffering, and preprocessing on ARM Cortex-M class microcontrollers.
  • Implement and optimize on-device signal processing and ML inference under tight power and memory budgets.
  • Design and build long-range radio communication protocols for reliable operation in the field.
  • Harden devices for unattended field deployment: watchdogs, OTA updates, brownout handling, telemetry, and graceful failure.
  • Support hardware bring-up and debugging at the hardware boundary as boards iterate: reading schematics and supporting on PCB development.
  • Test firmware on real hardware and iterate rapidly against feedback from live deployments.

Requirements

  • BSc, MSc, or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Physics, or a related technical field, or equivalent skills.
  • Strong embedded C/C++ on bare-metal or RTOS (Zephyr, FreeRTOS). You have shipped firmware to real devices.
  • Experience with low-power design on ARM Cortex-M class microcontrollers.
  • Comfortable on the hardware side: reading schematics, debugging with logic analyzers and scopes, working with ADCs, DMA, and peripheral buses.
  • Experience with wireless protocols (LoRa, sub-GHz, or similar) a strong plus.
  • Experience with audio capture, DSP pipelines, or on-device ML inference a strong plus.

What We Offer

Founding engineer at a small, well-funded team. You own the firmware stack, work directly with the founders, and get feedback from real deployments.

£50–90k base · 0.25–3% equity · Skilled Worker sponsorship available

Benefits

On-site gym Unlimited snacks Pets in office allowed Referral programme
Apply — join@ithacus.ai→

The Role

You will build the software backbone of a distributed sensor network: the systems that turn raw acoustic data from thousands of field-deployed nodes into real-time detection, classification, and localisation of drones, vehicles, people, and other threats.

The work is constrained by low-connectivity environments and users who need the system to work the first time.

Main Responsibilities

  • Design and build backend systems that ingest, process, and fuse data from distributed acoustic sensor nodes in real time.
  • Develop and productionise detection, classification, and localisation pipelines, working with DSP and ML models.
  • Build operator-facing tools: live maps, alerting, and network health monitoring used in the field.
  • Own infrastructure and deployment: networking, observability, and reliability in low-connectivity environments.
  • Work with large volumes of noisy, real-world sensor data: collection, labeling, evaluation.
  • Iterate directly against feedback from live deployments.

Requirements

  • BSc, MSc, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, or a related technical field, or equivalent skills.
  • Strong computer science fundamentals: data structures, distributed systems, networking, and cloud infrastructure.
  • Experience writing production code and operating real systems.
  • Proficiency in Python and at least one systems language (C++, Rust, or Go).
  • Experience with real-time data pipelines, streaming systems, or sensor data a strong plus.
  • Experience with ML workflows (training, evaluating, and productionising models) or DSP a strong plus.

What We Offer

Founding engineer at a small, well-funded team. You own real systems end to end, work directly with the founders, and get feedback from real deployments.

£50–90k base · 0.25–3% equity · Skilled Worker sponsorship available

Benefits

On-site gym Unlimited snacks Pets in office allowed Referral programme
Apply — join@ithacus.ai→
Who

Exceptional people, whatever the background.

Above all, we look for raw intelligence and the ability to lock in. Nobody has solved this problem before, so the solution will not come from following industry standards. We are looking for first-principles thinkers who are eager to build.

Working with us now:

If you are exceptional, we want to hear from you. Regardless of whether you fit a role or not.

How to apply

Write to us.

Send us three things:

join@ithacus.ai