Software Engineer, Autonomy

Description

The company builds a large swarming UAV and a versatile swarming aircraft network. It is preparing its first aircraft designed for swarming, along with command and control software that coordinates swarms of thousands of mixed autonomous assets.

The team has launched and sold several startups, closed defense deals worth billions of dollars, and built more than 30 new aircraft. Members come from Scaled Composites, Airbus, Archer Aviation, Blue Origin, and Boom Supersonic.

The autonomy stack already runs on real programs and hardware and was designed to work across different platforms. The next step is moving it onto the company's own aircraft to field the largest drone swarm in the world. The company is hiring a Software Engineer, Autonomy to own this stack and lead the work.

This is a senior technical role. You will set the architecture for the perception, planning, and control systems on every vehicle in the swarm and raise the standard for the autonomy engineers around you.

Responsibilities

• Own and develop the autonomy stack, adding agentic AI for onboard reasoning, adaptation, and swarm coordination as the swarm scales.
• Strengthen and extend the inter-robot and command and control communication protocols that support tactical edge decisions, including when comms are degraded or contested.
• Reassess the core technical tradeoffs as the work moves to aircraft: onboard or offboard compute, centralized or distributed decisions, determinism or adaptability. Decide which current choices hold up in airborne compute and contested comms, and defend those decisions.
• Move autonomy capability from integration and test into fielded use, and feed test data back into the stack.
• Mentor and technically guide a growing group of robotics engineers.
• Write clean, maintainable, efficient code and set the bar for quality.
• Travel up to 25% of the time for onsite test and integration events.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, robotics, or a closely related technical field.
• 5+ years building and deploying autonomy software at a major aerospace company or a serious autonomous vehicle program.
• You have owned the architecture of a shipped autonomous system, not just contributed components to one.
• Deep expertise in at least one systems language: C/C++, Rust, or Go.
• Proven experience deploying and validating advanced autonomy systems, such as vision-language-action models, learned world models, trajectory optimization, sensor fusion, and multi-agent coordination.
• Strong software engineering practice, with code that is testable and reliable.
• Preferred: experience with multi-agent or swarm systems.
• Preferred: experience with robotics middleware such as DDS/ROS2, ZeroMQ, or gRPC, and with Protobuf serialization.
• Preferred: familiarity with government UxS interoperability standards such as OMS/UCI, STANAG 4586, or FACE.
• Preferred: prior tech lead, staff engineer, or architect responsibility on an autonomy team.
• You must be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret security clearance. An active Secret clearance is preferred but not required.
• ITAR applies. To meet U.S. Government export rules, you must be a U.S. citizen, a lawful permanent resident, a protected individual under 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.

Conditions

Travel up to 25% of the time for onsite test and integration events.

Equal opportunity employer.

Benefits

• Meaningful equity in a high-growth defense technology company.
• Competitive base salary based on experience.
• Medical, dental, vision, and 401k.
• PTO and paid sick leave.
• Monthly wellness stipend.
• Daily catered lunch in the office.
• Paid parental leave.
• Direct impact on a critical national security mission.
• Work alongside a top team of engineers and operators on hard problems.