Senior Autonomy Software Engineer - Swarm & Perception

UFORCE; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

UFORCE, based in London, seeks a Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Autonomy) to design, build, and operate software for uncrewed surface vehicles within the C2/C4ISR stack.

You will lead perception, autonomy behaviours, and swarm capabilities, delivering cross-system interfaces and field-ready software that remains safe and observable in degraded sensing environments across sea states and GNSS/RF challenges.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of production software or backend engineering experience.
• Strong experience with Java, Python, or .NET/C#.
• Strong mathematical foundations relevant to autonomy and robotics.
• Experience with distributed, real-time, event-driven, or mission-critical systems.
• Understanding of sockets, UDP, latency, packet loss, and low-level protocols.
• Strong testing, observability, debugging, and operational ownership.
• Clear communication and cross-team collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Build production-grade capabilities across perception, autonomous behaviours, COLAV, and multi-USV coordination.
• Define measurable acceptance criteria for autonomy performance, safety, reliability, and operator trust.
• Validate perception and behaviours across day/night operations, different sea states, sensor degradation, and GNSS/RF-challenged conditions.
• Develop swarm capabilities such as task allocation, role assignment, formation control, and distributed sensing.
• Build scenario libraries, replay tooling, automated metrics, and CI gates to prevent regressions.
• Introduce structured logging, playback, and failure classification to accelerate field diagnosis.
• Build operator controls and safeguards that enable crews to use autonomy without continuous engineering support.
• Collaborate with platform, C2, product, and field teams to define clear interfaces and deliver cross-system capabilities.

Skills

8+ years

Java

Python

.NET/C#

Distributed systems

Sockets/UDP/latency

Testing/Observability

Cross-team collaboration

Job description

UFORCE, based in London, seeks a Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Autonomy) to design, build, and operate software for uncrewed surface vehicles within the C2/C4ISR stack.

You will lead perception, autonomy behaviours, and swarm capabilities, delivering cross-system interfaces and field-ready software that remains safe and observable in degraded sensing environments across sea states and GNSS/RF challenges.