Technical Operations Engineer - Mission Watchfloor

About Us

With more than 2 million nautical miles sailed and 50,000 days at sea, Saildrone has earned the trust of governments worldwide. Our unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) deliver continuous, real-time intelligence in the toughest oceans on Earth—giving our partners faster awareness, stronger security, and a decisive edge at sea.

Our USVs are long-range, extreme-endurance platforms powered by advanced sensors and proprietary AI - they have been designed to operate where no crewed vessel can. They collect critical insights above and below the surface to support border security, law enforcement, naval operations, and undersea infrastructure protection.

Headquartered in Alameda, CA, with offices in Washington, DC, and global deployment hubs, Saildrone operates missions worldwide. Join a fast-moving, mission-driven team at the intersection of AI, autonomy, and defense technology—where data turns into intelligence, and intelligence drives action.

As a Watchfloor Technical Operations Engineer you will serve as the front line of technical defense for Saildrone’s global fleet. You’ll sit at the center of live operations, monitoring system health, diagnosing issues, and responding rapidly to ensure our vehicles continue delivering critical data to customers around the world.

During business hours, you’ll be stationed on the watch floor alongside mission operators, providing real-time technical overwatch across hardware, software, and network systems. Outside of business hours, you’ll participate in an on-call rotation that ensures 24/7 coverage for the fleet.

Your actions will directly influence Saildrone’s most important operational metrics and revenue-generating capability. This is a role for someone who thrives in fast-moving, high-stakes environments. You’ll be the person everyone counts on when a vehicle goes offline mid-mission, when a new payload misbehaves, or when a root cause needs to be identified quickly. If you take pride in being the one who keeps the system running — the quiet hero behind every successful mission — this is where you belong.

• Develop a top-to-bottom understanding of complex sensors and embedded systems as they relate to an entire, functioning system.
• Monitor live vehicle operations across the global fleet, providing real-time technical overwatch using telemetry and diagnostic tools to proactively identify anomalies and emerging issues.
• Provide internal customer service to supported mission execution teams to quickly resolve any technical issues they experience, including performing readiness reviews and pre-deployment checks to ensure vehicles are fully mission-capable.
• Build trust with cross-functional teams and participate in root cause analysis to identify areas for improvement.
• Deliver structured technical feedback into engineering, helping to shape long-term fixes, design revisions, and reliability improvements.
• Provide on-call support to troubleshoot, diagnose, and fix software, hardware, and networking issues on autonomous surface vehicles.
• Participate in on-call rotations for high-impact, high-priority issue resolution.
• Develop and maintain troubleshooting playbooks, documentation, and tools to speed up incident response and improve team consistency.
• Contribute directly to fleet reliability metrics, maintaining accountability for vehicle uptime, mission success rates, and incident resolution performance.

• 2+ years in a field support, systems integration, operations engineering, or technical watch floor environment.
• Ability to independently apply knowledge of electrical diagrams/schematics, and mechanical systems to identify a problem with a product, determine the cause, and execute an appropriate repair.
• Familiar with electrical, mechanical, and materials engineering concepts.
• Able to context switch quickly to respond to new and urgent issues.
• Comfortable obtaining data and diagnosing issues from software and networking platforms using command-line tools on a Linux OS.
• Strong understanding of electrical, mechanical, and networking fundamentals, and how these disciplines interact within complex embedded systems for diagnostics,…