Staff Software Engineer, Autonomy

Swarm Aero is developing autonomous aircraft and command-and-control software for large UAV swarms. The Staff Software Engineer, Autonomy will lead the onboard autonomy stack, including perception, planning, control, communications, integration, and field deployment, while technically guiding robotics engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Own and evolve our autonomy stack, extending proven robotic foundations with agentic AI for onboard reasoning, adaptation, and swarm coordination at scale
• Harden and extend the inter-robot and C2 communication protocols behind tactical swarm decision making on the edge, including under degraded and contested comms
• Revisit and defend the hard technical tradeoffs as we move to aircraft and scale: onboard vs. offboard compute, centralized vs. distributed decision making, determinism vs. adaptability. Some of our current answers carry over. Some won't survive the move to airborne compute and contested comms. You'll decide which
• Take autonomy capability from integration and test into fielded operation, and close the loop from test data back into the stack
• Mentor and technically guide a growing team of robotics engineers
• Write clean, maintainable, and efficient code, and set the standard for what good looks like
• Travel up to 25% of the time for onsite test and integration events

Requirements:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical field
• 3+ years building soft-real-time embedded systems
• Deep expertise in at least one systems language (Golang, Rust, or C/C++)
• Proven experience deploying and validating robotics algorithms (Dubins planning, SLAM, Kalman filters, particle filters, A•, behavior trees, reinforcement learning, etc.)
• Working knowledge of embedded systems (SPI/I2C/serial protocols, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, microcontroller programming)
• Strong networking fundamentals (NAT, mDNS, UDP/TCP, multicast, firewall configuration)
• Excellent software engineering practices with emphasis on testable, reliable code
• To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State
• Experience with perception systems, sensor fusion, or multi-target tracking (Kalman-based trackers, JPDA, MHT, or similar)
• Contributions to deployed robotics or IoT systems requiring complex edge processing (aerospace, autonomous vehicles, etc.)
• Experience with robotics middleware (DDS/ROS2, ZeroMQ, gRPC) and serialization formats (Protobuf)
• Familiarity with government UxS interoperability standards (OMS/UCI, STANAG 4586, FACE)
• Hands-on electronics skills (breadboarding, soldering, schematic interpretation, datasheet analysis)
• Deep learning experience