Software Engineer, Autonomy

The role

You will own and evolve the autonomy stack, including perception, planning, and control systems. You will lead the architectural direction for onboard vehicle systems and mentor a team of robotics engineers.

What you will do

• Own and evolve the autonomy stack using agentic AI for reasoning and swarm coordination
• Harden and extend inter-robot and C2 communication protocols
• Decide technical tradeoffs regarding compute and decision making
• Take autonomy capability from integration and test into fielded operation
• Mentor and technically guide a growing team of robotics engineers
• Write clean, maintainable, and efficient code

Required 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
• 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 coordinatio
• Excellent software engineering practices with emphasis on testable, reliable code

Nice to have

• 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
• Active Secret clearance

Benefits

• Meaningful equity
• Competitive base salary
• Medical, dental, vision, and 401k
• PTO and paid sick leave
• Monthly wellness stipend
• Daily catered lunch (office)
• Paid parental leave

Before you apply

• Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. Secret security clearance
• 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. Depart

About the company

Swarm Aero is building the largest swarming UAV and the most versatile swarming aircraft network in the world. The team has aerospace experience from Scaled Composites, Airbus, Archer Aviation, Blue Origin, and Boom Supersonic.