Staff Software Engineer, Sensing Systems

Description

The company builds defense products on its Coherent Distributed Networks platform, which helps warfighters, commercial air operators and border protection teams act faster and respond to changing threats.

The company was founded in 2022 and has raised $1 billion from investors including 8VC, Accel and Valor Equity Partners. It is headquartered in Los Angeles with offices in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, San Diego and London.

The team is small and works closely with the hardware, the missions it supports and the results in the field.

Responsibilities

• Join the electro-optical group as one of its first software engineers, starting with long-range EO/IR sensors and possibly moving to mobile and airborne platforms.
• Make the sensor, and every sensor around it, operate as one system through your software.
• Write code that works across many camera heads and configurations, meets its performance targets, and adapts to mission and customer needs.
• Build harnesses and graphs that move a capability from first commit through simulation and hardware in the loop to full end-to-end tests, with as little manual effort as possible.
• Build a system that runs complete tests on real hardware at the test sites without supervision and reports what happened.
• Improve simulation and replay so more of each feature can be built and verified before it reaches hardware.
• Design the interfaces, timing and data flow that let radar, cameras and other sensors work together.
• Deploy, monitor and fix live software on edge hardware at test and customer sites.
• Work in a small team that tests in the field, changes code on the spot and checks the results on the next flight.
• Help the company shift toward developing as much as possible without real hardware, with AI doing as much of the work as it can be trusted with. Hardware remains the final test.
• This is a software engineering role, not algorithm research, physics modeling, applied machine learning or pure DevOps, although you will run some infrastructure.

Requirements

• Strong engineering fundamentals and curiosity matter more to the company than experience with any particular technology or domain.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering, including owning a production system from design through release and repair.
• A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Strong Python skills, with a record of building services and tools that other engineers rely on.
• Working knowledge of Linux, Docker, networking and CI, and the ability to get a multi-service system running on unfamiliar hardware.
• Effective use of AI coding tools such as Cursor or Claude Code, with a clear sense of what to hand off and what to write yourself. You must be able to write, explain and debug your own code without them.
• Grounding in the physical world from an engineering degree, hands-on hardware, sensor or robotics work, or time with systems that had to work outside the lab. You can read a schematic, understand a test rack and speak with optics or RF engineers.
• Willingness to work on site when your code runs, and to debug and ship a fix before the next flight.
• A habit of measuring instead of guessing: you design the experiment and trust the data.
• Experience with cameras, EO/IR sensors, gimbals, radar, or video pipelines such as GStreamer or DeepStream.
• Experience with embedded Linux or edge computing, especially NVIDIA Jetson, and with GPU or CUDA work.
• Experience in robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones or aerospace.
• Experience with hardware-in-the-loop test rigs or test automation against real hardware.
• Experience with simulation or game engines such as Gazebo, Isaac Sim or Unreal.
• Experience building AI agent harnesses or workflow graphs.
• Experience with C++ or TypeScript.
• Defense or aerospace experience, or a current U.S. security clearance.

Conditions

On-site work in El Segundo, CA.

Regular travel to test sites and field deployments.

Must be a U.S. Person, because the role requires access to U.S.-only data systems.

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

Base salary is competitive. The posted range covers base pay only and excludes bonus, equity and benefits. Offers depend on factors such as experience, education, training, critical skills and business needs, and candidates outside the range are still welcome to apply.

Equity-free details aside, the company offers generous pre-IPO stock option grants, relocation assistance, and annual bonuses that are coming soon.

The company has more than 500 employees across 5 offices worldwide.

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 and life insurance.
• Free lunch every day when you work on site, a fully stocked kitchen, unlimited PTO and a casual dress code.