Lead Autonomy Engineer

Compensation: Up to $300,000 Base + Equity + Full Benefits

Location: Remote (U.S.

-Based)

We are partnering with a venture-backed defense technology startup—founded by aerospace veterans that is building the world’s largest swarming UAV network and command-and-control (C2) platform. They are looking for a Staff-level technical leader to own the onboard autonomy architecture and scale coordination across thousands of heterogeneous aerial systems.

• Own the Autonomy Stack: Define the technical roadmap and architecture for onboard perception, planning, and control, integrating agentic AI to drive real-time swarm reasoning and coordination.
• Build Resilient Edge Comms: Architect and harden inter-vehicle and C2 communication protocols to ensure reliable tactical decision-making in degraded or contested environments.
• Navigate Architectural Tradeoffs: Make high-impact system design decisions around onboard vs. offboard compute, centralized vs. decentralized control, and deterministic vs. adaptive behaviors at scale.
• Develop Sensor Fusion & Tracking: Design and deploy production-grade algorithms for state estimation, multi-sensor data association, track management, and shared situational awareness.
• Bridge Simulation to Live Flight: Take autonomous capabilities from SIL/HIL simulation into the field for live flight testing, rapidly iterating by feeding real-world telemetry back into the core stack.

• Proven Track Record: 7+ years of experience shipping production software for robotics, UAVs, or autonomous vehicles, anchored in distributed systems and embedded edge compute.
• Systems Engineering Mastery: Production-level fluency in C/C++, Rust, or Go.
• Core Autonomy Algorithms: Hands-on experience deploying robotics fundamentals in the real world—such as SLAM, Kalman/particle filters, Dubins path planning, A*, behavior trees, or reinforcement learning.
• Embedded & Networking Depth: Practical familiarity with low-level hardware interfaces (SPI, I2C, UART/serial, microcontrollers) and network protocols (UDP/TCP, multicast, mDNS, NAT).
• Compliance & Field Readiness: Ability to travel up to 25% for live flight test campaigns; must qualify as a U.S. Person under ITAR regulations.

• Background in multi-target tracking (JPDA, MHT) and large-scale multi-agent swarm coordination.
• Production experience with robotics middleware and serialization frameworks (ROS 2/DDS, ZeroMQ, gRPC, Protobuf).
• Working knowledge of defense unmanned system standards (OMS/UCI, STANAG 4586, FACE).
• Active U.S. Secret clearance (or eligibility to obtain and maintain one).

• Compensation & Ownership: Up to $300,000 base salary paired with meaningful early-stage equity in a rapidly scaling defense company.
• Comprehensive Benefits: Full medical, dental, and vision coverage, 401(k), flexible PTO, and a monthly wellness stipend.
• Mission-Critical Impact: Direct architectural ownership over next-generation autonomous systems deployed for national security.