Autonomy Architect for Drone Swarm Systems

Swarm Aero; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful equity

Competitive base salary

Medical, dental, vision, 401k

PTO and paid sick leave

Monthly wellness stipend

Daily catered lunch (office)

Paid parental leave

Direct impact on national security

World-class engineering team

Job summary

Swarm Aero is redefining air power with the world’s largest drone swarm and a versatile swarm aircraft network. We seek a Software Engineer, Autonomy to own the autonomy architecture across all vehicles, defining perception, planning, and control onboard the swarm.

You will set technical direction, mentor engineers, and travel up to 25% for on-site tests. Join a fast-moving defense tech company offering meaningful equity, competitive base salary, and comprehensive benefits while contributing to

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Robotics or a related field.
• 5+ years building and deploying autonomy software at a major aerospace or autonomous vehicle program.
• Owned architecture for a shipped autonomous system, not just components.
• Deep expertise in at least one systems language (C/C++, Rust, or Go).
• Experience with frontier autonomy systems: vision-language-action models, world models, trajectory optimization, sensor fusion, and multi-agent coordination.

Responsibilities

• Architect a next-generation autonomy stack for onboard reasoning, adaptation, and swarm coordination.
• Define inter-robot and C2 communication protocols for tactical swarm decision making at the edge.
• Evaluate tradeoffs: onboard vs offboard compute, centralized vs distributed decision making, determinism vs adaptability.
• Mentor and guide a growing robotics engineering team.
• Write clean, maintainable code and set the standard for quality.
• Travel up to 25% for onsite test and integration events.

Skills

Autonomy software

C/C++

Rust

Go

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor's Degree in CS/Robotics

Tools

ROS2

DDS/ROS2

ZeroMQ

gRPC

Protobuf

Job description

Swarm Aero is redefining air power with the world’s largest drone swarm and a versatile swarm aircraft network. We seek a Software Engineer, Autonomy to own the autonomy architecture across all vehicles, defining perception, planning, and control onboard the swarm.

You will set technical direction, mentor engineers, and travel up to 25% for on-site tests. Join a fast-moving defense tech company offering meaningful equity, competitive base salary, and comprehensive benefits while contributing to