Senior Vehicle Communications & Network Engineer

Overview

Role: Senior Vehicle Communications & Network Engineer

Location: San Diego, CA

Salary: $150,000- $200,000 / yr + stock options, 401k matching, and other benefits.

Role Overview: Seasats builds autonomous surface vessels (ASVs) that deliver persistent maritime intelligence for defense, scientific, and commercial customers.

As a Senior Communications & Network Engineer, you’ll own the end-to-end communications architecture that connects Seasats’ autonomous surface vehicles to operators, satellites, and each other. You will design, test, harden, and scale communications for real-world operations across cellular, satellite, and radio links. You’ll also spend hands-on time supporting vehicle tests and customer payload integrations. Whether vehicles are operating near land or hundreds of miles offshore, reliable communications are critical to mission success.

You’ll report to our CTO and collaborate closely with the vehicle software team to deliver robust, field-proven communications for autonomous missions.

On a day-by-day basis, you will:

• Design and tune failover and prioritization between cellular, satellite, and IP radio links
• Integrate radios, modems, antennas, and networking hardware
• Iterate on and maintain versioned, repeatable router configurations for fleet deployment
• Work closely with vehicle software engineers to optimize telemetry, command, and video bandwidth usage over constrained or intermittent links
• Support customer payload networking, including VLAN design, routing policies, firewall rules, VPN access, and traffic isolation between systems
• Troubleshoot field connectivity issues using packet captures, routing analysis, and logs to diagnose issues during and after live vehicle operations
• Design secure remote access patterns for operators and customers

• 7+ years of experience in network engineering or a related discipline
• Strong networking fundamentals (routing, firewalling, VPNs), with hands-on experience configuring and debugging them in real deployments
• Experience administrating networks with distributed clients
• Hands-on experience with OpenWRT or similar embedded router platforms
• Experience designing and operating multi-WAN systems over unreliable links such as cellular, satellite, or long-range radio
• Excellent debugging and systems-level troubleshooting skills
• Comfort with bash scripting

Additionally, you may have one or more of the following qualifications:

• Experience with specific satellite or cellular modems, SIM management, or carrier integrations
• A robotics, autonomous systems, or vehicle networking background
• Experience with Python

At Seasats, we're passionate about delivering maritime robotics solutions to redefine the maritime industry. Our primary products are autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs), designed to carry sensors at sea for months at a time. Our ASVs provide persistent monitoring and data acquisition to defense, scientific, and commercial customers, and have autonomously crossed both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. After thousands of years in which the only way to gather information from the ocean was to put people on a boat, these uncrewed vessels are transforming how humanity monitors and interacts with the ocean.

Here, you’ll find the space and opportunity to do your life’s best work.

Along with your salary, you’ll receive perks including:

• Competitive insurance (including a 99% employer-covered Gold HMO plan or other options)
• 401k matching up to 4% of salary
• Four free lunches per week
• An employee activity fund
• A pet-friendly office
• Unlimited/Flex PTO

When applying, you’ll be asked to provide a resume and answer a few screening questions.

Please note that we are currently unable to sponsor employment visas, so candidates must be independently authorized to work in the United States.

We appreciate diverse perspectives and life experiences, and we’re committed to building a team that reflects a wide range of backgrounds. Seasats provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination of any type based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under federal, state, or local law.

We look forward to reviewing your application!