Senior Swarm Autonomy Engineer

Red Cat Holdings; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Red Cat Holdings seeks a Senior Autonomous Behavior Engineer in San Diego to translate customer use cases into deployable drone behaviors, from whiteboard concepts to field validation with live drones.

You will own testing across simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, and live flight, collaborating with QA, field teams, and UI/UX to expose operator levers and ensure clean API surfaces for integrations.

Qualifications

• Must be a US Citizen
• 7+ years of professional experience in robotics, autonomy, modeling and simulation, or a closely related technical domain
• Strong proficiency in C++
• Demonstrated experience designing and implementing autonomous behaviors for ground, air, surface, or subsurface platforms
• Strong foundation in linear algebra and vector math with optimization or control theory
• Comfort with full behavior-development lifecycle from concept to field validation
• Experience translating operator requirements into deployable code
• Proficiency with simulation environments such as Gazebo, ROS, AirSim, SITL

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and field-validate new autonomous behaviors for ASR’s swarm platform from customer use cases through deployment
• Collaborate with mission engineers, customers, and field teams to extract operational requirements and decompose them into autonomy primitives
• Define operator levers and workflows with UI/UX teams and standardize API surfaces for partner integrations
• Build and run simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, and live-flight tests with clear pass/fail criteria
• Maintain and extend the behavior library with documentation and regression test coverage
• Work with QA, Test engineers to integrate behavior tests into CI/CD and pre-demonstration flights
• Contribute to architectural decisions about the autonomy stack including primitive selection and behavior arbitration
• Suggest refinements to improve velocity and reliability of future behavior development
• Support field exercises and customer demonstrations where new behaviors are flown for the first time

Skills

Autonomy

Robotics

Field testing

Education

MS or PhD in Robotics

Tools

Gazebo

ROS

AirSim

SITL

C++

Job description

Red Cat Holdings seeks a Senior Autonomous Behavior Engineer in San Diego to translate customer use cases into deployable drone behaviors, from whiteboard concepts to field validation with live drones.

You will own testing across simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, and live flight, collaborating with QA, field teams, and UI/UX to expose operator levers and ensure clean API surfaces for integrations.