Staff Software Engineer, Autonomy

Description

The company is building the largest swarming UAV and a versatile swarming aircraft network. It is moving fast to launch its first aircraft designed for swarming, along with Command & Control software that lets operators direct swarms of thousands of mixed autonomous assets.

The team has founded and sold several startups, closed defense deals worth billions of dollars, and designed and built more than 30 new aircraft. Members come from aerospace employers including 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 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 Staff Software Engineer, Autonomy to own this stack and lead the work.

The role sets the architecture for the perception, planning, and control software on every vehicle in the swarm and raises the standard for the autonomy engineers around you.

Responsibilities

• Own and develop the autonomy stack by building agentic AI for onboard reasoning, adaptation, and swarm coordination on top of proven robotics foundations.
• Strengthen and extend the inter-robot and C2 communication protocols that support tactical swarm decisions at the edge, including when comms are degraded or contested.
• Revisit the major technical tradeoffs as the system moves to aircraft: onboard versus offboard compute, centralized versus distributed decisions, and determinism versus adaptability. Decide which current answers still hold and which do not.
• Move autonomy capabilities from integration and testing into fielded operation, 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, or a related technical field.
• At least 3 years building soft-real-time embedded systems.
• Deep expertise in at least one systems language: Golang, Rust, or C/C++.
• Proven experience deploying and validating robotics algorithms such as Dubins planning, SLAM, Kalman filters, particle filters, A*, behavior trees, and reinforcement learning.
• Working knowledge of embedded systems, including SPI, I2C, and serial protocols, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, and microcontroller programming.
• Strong networking fundamentals, including NAT, mDNS, UDP/TCP, multicast, and firewall configuration.
• Strong software engineering practices, with an emphasis on testable, reliable code.
• Preferred: experience with perception systems, sensor fusion, or multi-target tracking, such as Kalman-based trackers, JPDA, MHT, or similar.
• Preferred: contributions to deployed robotics or IoT systems that need complex edge processing, such as aerospace or autonomous vehicles.
• 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: hands-on electronics skills, including breadboarding, soldering, schematic reading, and datasheet analysis.
• Preferred: deep learning experience.

Conditions

You must be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret security clearance. An active Secret clearance is preferred but not required.

To meet U.S. Government export rules, you must be a U.S. citizen, a lawful permanent resident of the U.S., a protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.

Benefits

• Meaningful equity in a high-growth defense technology company.
• Competitive base salary based on experience.
• Medical, dental, vision, and 401k coverage.
• 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 genuinely hard problems.