Software Engineer, Autonomy

Swarm Aero is redefining air power, building the largest swarming UAV and the most versatile swarming aircraft network in the world. They are seeking a Software Engineer, Autonomy to define and own the autonomy architecture for the largest drone swarm, setting the architectural direction for perception, planning, and control systems. The role involves mentoring engineers, making technical trade-offs, and writing efficient code.

Responsibilities:

• Architect a next-generation autonomy stack that combines rigorous robotic foundations with cutting-edge agentic AI for onboard reasoning, adaptation, and swarm coordination
• Define the inter-robot and C2 communication protocols required to enable tactical swarm decision making on the edge
• Make and defend the hard technical tradeoffs: onboard vs. offboard compute, centralized vs. distributed decision making, determinism vs. adaptability
• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• 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