Software Engineer, Sensing Systems

Description

The company builds defense products for warfighters, commercial air operators and border protection teams, helping them act faster and respond to new threats.

Its products run on a coherent distributed network core. Founded in 2022, the company has raised $1 billion from investors including 8VC, Accel and Valor Equity Partners.

Headquarters are in Los Angeles, with offices in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, San Diego and London. The company has over 500 employees.

Responsibilities

• Join as one of the first software engineers on the electro-optical team, currently working on long-range EO/IR sensors and later on sensors mounted on mobile and airborne platforms.
• Write the software that lets a sensor, and every sensor around it, operate as one system, wherever that sensor is mounted.
• This is a software-first role. You do not need camera or computer vision expertise, but you should be a strong engineer who likes physical systems and knows that real sensors drift, disagree and behave differently in the field than in simulation.
• The team tests in the field itself. You will run tests live, change code live and see the results on the next flight.
• Help build pipelines that move a capability from first commit through simulation and hardware-in-the-loop to full end-to-end testing, using AI where it can be trusted. The long-term goal is fully autonomous end-to-end tests on real hardware at the company's test sites.
• Write code that works across many camera heads and configurations while still meeting performance targets.
• Build harnesses and workflows that carry work from first commit to real-world testing with minimal manual steps.
• Create an autonomous system that runs full tests on real hardware at test sites and reports what happened.
• Improve simulation and replay so more of each feature can be proven before it reaches hardware.
• Develop the interfaces, timing and data flow that let radar, cameras and other sensors work together.
• Deploy, monitor and patch live software on edge hardware at test and customer sites.
• This role does not involve algorithm research, inventing new detection or tracking methods, building physics models in MATLAB or Simulink, or training models on sensor data. It is not mainly DevOps either, though you will run infrastructure.

Requirements

• Strong engineering fundamentals and curiosity matter more to us than any particular tool or domain.
• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, including owning a production system from design through launch and repair.
• A degree in computer science, engineering, physics or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Strong Python skills for building services and tools that other engineers depend on, beyond scripts and notebooks.
• Working knowledge of Linux, Docker, networking and CI, and the ability to get a multi-service system running on hardware you have never used.
• Effective use of AI coding tools such as Cursor or Claude Code, with judgment about what to hand off. You must still be able to write, explain and debug your own code unaided.
• Practical grounding in the physical world through an engineering degree, hands-on hardware, sensor or robotics work, or time with systems that had to function outside a lab. You can read a schematic, understand a test rack and discuss the work with optics or RF engineers.
• Willingness to work in the field, be present when your code runs, and ship a fix before the next flight.
• A habit of measuring: build the experiment, then trust the data.
• Experience with cameras, EO/IR sensors, gimbals, radar, or video pipelines such as GStreamer or DeepStream.
• Embedded Linux or edge computing, particularly NVIDIA Jetson, plus GPU or CUDA work.
• Background in robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones or aerospace.
• Experience with hardware-in-the-loop test rigs or test automation against real hardware.
• Simulation or game engine work with Gazebo, Isaac Sim, Unreal or similar tools.
• Experience building AI agent harnesses or workflow graphs.
• C++ or TypeScript.
• Defense or aerospace experience, or a current U.S. security clearance.

Conditions

The job is on site in El Segundo, CA.

Expect regular travel to test sites and field deployments.

U.S. Person status is required because the role needs access to U.S.-only data systems.

You must be able to obtain and keep a U.S. security clearance.

The stated pay range covers base salary only and excludes bonus, equity and benefits. You are still welcome to apply if your pay expectations fall outside it. The range is an estimate, and the actual offer may depend on experience, education, training, critical skills and business needs.

Benefits

• Medical, dental and vision coverage, with premiums paid 100% by the company.
• 401k with a 50% company match on contributions up to 6% of pay, plus FSA, HSA, life insurance and more.
• Free lunch daily when you are working onsite, a fully stocked kitchen, unlimited PTO and a casual dress code.
• Competitive base salaries, generous pre-IPO stock option grants and relocation assistance.
• Annual bonuses are coming soon.