Robotics Software Engineer

Wing Xpand is Expanding What’s Possible™ with Autonomous Systems, building long-endurance, backpackable smart plane drones and robotics systems that support defense, public safety, disaster response, and commercial missions. Our platforms operate across air, ground, and maritime domains, integrating autonomy, AI-powered sensing, edge computing, and networked systems to deliver real-world intelligence and threat detection. We design, build, and deploy complete systems — hardware, software, and data — and we move fast.

As Wing Xpand scales, we are seeking high performers to grow with our team.

Three robots, one autonomy stack. Our backpackable smart plane drone, unmanned ground vehicle, and unmanned surface vessel all run the same xPAIR robotic core, which means the autonomy you write has to hold up in the air, on the ground, and on the water — with payloads and detections moving between vehicles rather than being re-integrated for each one. Most autonomy roles are one airframe in one domain.

This isn't.

We're looking for a Staff Robotics Software Engineer to own significant parts of that core. Hands-on individual contributor with an architecture mandate: you'll decide what belongs in the shared core and what stays vehicle-specific, where the open-source flight stack ends and our own code begins, and how the interfaces hold as we add systems. Then you'll write the hard parts yourself.

Code you write today is on a vehicle testing in the field tomorrow.

Small team, no layer between you and the founders, no queue to get a decision made. If you've built autonomy for vehicles that actually fly or drive, you'll be at home here. We're also happy to talk to a strong engineer from an adjacent field that's excited to build robotics. If you've spent your career writing C++ for physical machines, whether that's industrial control, automotive, medical devices, or real-time embedded, let's connect.

• Design and develop robotics and autonomy software across our unmanned aircraft, ground, and surface platforms.
• Implement and improve autonomous behaviors, navigation, and mission logic — including contingency behavior and what the vehicle does when the link drops or GPS goes away.
• Integrate new sensors, payloads, and perception capabilities into the robotics stack, end to end from driver to operator display.
• Develop software for collaborative robotic systems and multi-agent coordination: shared tasking, air-to-ground cueing, and multi-vehicle relay for persistent coverage.
• Make it run on the edge — embedded Linux, GPU inference on Jetson-class hardware, Docker, real-time detection with no backhaul.
• Keep it working when communications degrade: mesh networking, radio-silent operation, and graceful failure.
• Deploy, test, and validate software on real robotic platforms and on the supporting ground and infrastructure software.
• Work closely with hardware, avionics, electrical, mechanical, and systems engineers to integrate and optimize performance.
• Troubleshoot and debug across the software and hardware boundary, and drive up system reliability.
• Participate in testing, experimentation, and rapid iteration of new capabilities, and turn what you learn in the field into product changes.
• Contribute to system architecture and the long-term direction of our autonomy stack, and set technical direction on the areas you own.
• Raise the bar through code review, technical standards, and mentorship.
• Travel to test sites, customer demonstrations, and field events. Expect roughly 10%.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with C++ in a Linux development environment.
• Enough depth in state estimation, sensor fusion, and closed-loop control to write or replace an estimator,…