Staff Software Engineer, Autonomy
Swarm Aero14 days ago
Remote, United StatesStaff+
Base Salary
$220k - $300k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own and evolve the autonomy stack, extending robotic foundations with agentic AI for onboard reasoning, adaptation, and swarm coordination.
- Harden and extend inter-robot and command-and-control communication protocols for tactical edge decision-making under degraded or contested communications.
- Lead architectural tradeoffs involving onboard versus offboard compute, centralized versus distributed decision-making, and determinism versus adaptability.
- Take autonomy capabilities from integration and testing into fielded operations and use test data to improve the software stack.
- Mentor and technically guide a growing team of robotics engineers.
- Write clean, maintainable, efficient, testable, and reliable code and establish engineering standards.
- Travel up to 25% for onsite test and integration events.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related technical field.
- At least 3 years of experience building soft-real-time embedded systems.
- Deep expertise in at least one systems language: Golang, Rust, or C/C++.
- Experience deploying and validating robotics algorithms including Dubins planning, SLAM, Kalman filters, particle filters, A*, behavior trees, or reinforcement learning.
- Working knowledge of embedded systems, including SPI, I2C, serial protocols, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, and microcontroller programming.
- Strong networking fundamentals, including NAT, mDNS, UDP/TCP, multicast, and firewall configuration.
- Strong software engineering practices focused on testable and reliable code.
- Preferred experience with perception systems, sensor fusion, multi-target tracking, deployed robotics or IoT systems, complex edge processing, robotics middleware, serialization formats, government UxS interoperability standards, electronics, and deep learning.
- Applicants must meet the stated ITAR eligibility requirements: U.S. citizenship, lawful permanent residence, protected-individual status, or eligibility to obtain required U.S. Department of State authorizations.
Benefits
- Meaningful equity in a high-growth defense technology company.
- Competitive base salary commensurate with experience.
- Medical, dental, vision, and 401(k) benefits.
- PTO and paid sick leave.
- Monthly wellness stipend.
- Daily catered lunch at the office.
- Paid parental leave.
- Direct impact on a critical national security mission.
- Travel up to 25% for onsite testing and integration events.
About Swarm Aero
Swarm Aero develops swarming unmanned aircraft and command-and-control software that coordinate thousands of heterogeneous autonomous drones for defense and national security operations. The privately held company, founded in 2022, is building an aircraft purpose-built for swarm deployments and a distributed perception and sensor-fusion stack to give operators a shared picture of the battlespace.