Staff Software Engineer, Drone Autonomy & Swarm Lead

OpenKrill; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity grant

Competitive base salary

Medical, dental, vision

401k

Paid time off

Wellness stipend

Parental leave

Impact on national security

Job summary

Swarm Aero seeks a Software Engineer, Autonomy to own and evolve the onboard autonomy stack, coordinating perception, planning, and control for a drone swarm. You will shape architecture, onboard reasoning, and edge intelligence while guiding a growing robotics team.

You will defend tradeoffs for onboard vs. offboard compute and centralized vs. distributed decisions, and ensure reliable, testable code as we scale to field operations.

Qualifications

• 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.

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.
• 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.

Skills

3+ years embedded

Golang

Rust

C/C++

Networking fundamentals

Testable code

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/SE

Tools

ROS2

DDS/ZeroMQ

gRPC

Protobuf

Job description

Swarm Aero seeks a Software Engineer, Autonomy to own and evolve the onboard autonomy stack, coordinating perception, planning, and control for a drone swarm. You will shape architecture, onboard reasoning, and edge intelligence while guiding a growing robotics team.

You will defend tradeoffs for onboard vs. offboard compute and centralized vs. distributed decisions, and ensure reliable, testable code as we scale to field operations.