Software Engineer, Autonomy

Roboticsconnected; Oxnard (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Competitive salary

Medical/dental/vision

401k

PTO

Wellness stipend

Office lunch

Parental leave

Impactful mission

Engineering team

Job summary

Swarm Aero is building the largest swarming UAV network and scaling its autonomy stack across all vehicles. The Software Engineer, Autonomy will own the stack, guide architecture for perception, planning and control, and mentor a growing robotics team.

You will extend onboard reasoning, ensure robust C2 and inter-robot communication, and navigate tradeoffs for airborne compute and contested links while delivering field-ready software.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS, software engineering, robotics or related field.
• 5+ years building autonomy software in aerospace or autonomous vehicle programs.
• Experience owning architecture for a shipped autonomous system.
• Deep expertise in C/C++, Rust or Go.
• Experience deploying frontier autonomy systems: perception, planning, control, and multi-agent coordination.
• Strong software engineering practices and testable code.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve our autonomy stack with onboard reasoning and swarm coordination.
• Harden inter-robot and C2 communication protocols for edge decision making.
• Evaluate tradeoffs for onboard vs offboard compute and centralized vs distributed control.
• Move autonomy capability from integration into fielded operation and close loop with test data.
• Mentor and guide a growing robotics team.
• Write clean, maintainable, efficient code and set coding standards.
• Travel up to 25% for onsite test and integration events.

Skills

Autonomy software

C/C++

Rust

Go

System architecture

Robotics middleware

Vision-language-action

Sensor fusion

Multi-agent coordination

Testable code

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/SE/Robotics

Tools

DDS/ROS2

ZeroMQ

gRPC

Protobuf

Job description

Swarm Aero is redefining air power, building the largest swarming UAV and the most versatile swarming aircraft network in the world. The company is moving quickly to launch the first aircraft designed specifically for swarming, as well as the Command & Control software to mobilize swarms of thousands of heterogeneous autonomous assets and empower human operators to achieve superhuman results.

The team has created and exited multiple startups, negotiated defense deals worth billions of dollars, and designed and built 30+ novel aircraft, with aerospace experience from Scaled Composites, Airbus, Archer Aviation, Blue Origin, and Boom Supersonic.

About the Role

We've built an autonomy stack that already runs on real programs and real hardware, and we designed it to be platform-agnostic from the start. The next step is the one that matters most: scaling it onto our own aircraft to field the largest drone swarm in the world. We're looking for a Software Engineer, Autonomy to own that stack and lead the work.

This is a high-leverage technical role. You'll own the architectural direction for the perception, planning, and control systems running onboard every vehicle in the swarm, and you'll raise the bar for the autonomy engineers building around you.

What You'll Do

• 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.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Robotics, or related technical field.
• 5+ years building and deploying autonomy software at a major aerospace company or serious autonomous vehicle program.
• Track record of owning architecture for a shipped autonomous system, not just contributing components to one.
• Deep expertise in at least one systems language (C/C++, Rust, or Go).
• Proven experience deploying and validating frontier autonomy systems, including vision-language-action models, learned world models, trajectory optimization, sensor fusion, and multi-agent coordination.
• Excellent software engineering practices with emphasis on testable, reliable code.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with multi-agent or swarm systems.
• Experience with robotics middleware (DDS/ROS2, ZeroMQ, gRPC) and serialization formats (Protobuf).
• Familiarity with government UxS interoperability standards (OMS/UCI, STANAG 4586, FACE).
• Prior tech lead, staff engineer, or architect responsibility on an autonomy team.
• Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret security clearance. Active Secret clearance preferred but not required.

ITAR requirement

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.

Swarm Aero is an equal opportunity employer. We value diverse backgrounds and experiences and make employment decisions without regard to race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, or disability.

What We Offer

• Meaningful equity in a high-growth defense technology company
• Competitive base salary commensurate with experience
• Medical, dental, vision, and 401k
• PTO and paid sick leave
• Monthly wellness stipend
• Daily catered lunch (office)
• Paid parental leave
• Direct impact on a critical national security mission
• A world-class team of engineers and operators solving genuinely hard problems