Software Engineer, Autonomy
Job Fit Check
Base Career helps you apply smarter for this job.
Key skills for this role
Role Overview
We're looking for a Software Engineer, Autonomy to help define and own the autonomy architecture for the largest drone swarm in the world. This is a foundational technical role. You will set the architectural direction for the perception, planning, and control systems running onboard every vehicle in the swarm, and you will raise the bar for the autonomy engineers building around you.
Key Skills for This Role
Full Job Posting
About the Role
We're looking for a Software Engineer, Autonomy to help define and own the autonomy architecture for the largest drone swarm in the world. This is a foundational technical role. You will set the architectural direction for the perception, planning, and control systems running onboard every vehicle in the swarm, and you will raise the bar for the autonomy engineers building around you.
What You'll Do
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.
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.
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
About Swarm Aero
Private aerospace-defense company building UAV swarms and command-and-control software for U.S. forces and allies.
Visit company websiteJobs and hiring trendsApply for this job in 1 click
Skip the repetitive application forms
Install the Base Career Chrome Extension and autofill job applications across major job boards with your profile.
Trusted by over 500,000 job seekers on Base Career
More from this employer
More jobs at Swarm Aero
Engineering Administrator, Aircraft
Oxnard, USA
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 sw
Engineering Administrator, Aircraft
Oxnard, USA
Composite Engineering (M&P) Inten
Oxnard, USA
Structures Design Engineer, Aiframe
Oxnard, USA
Avionics Engineer Inten
Oxnard, USA
Embedded Software Intern
Oxnard, USA
Embedded Software Engineer, Avionics
Oxnard, USA
Software Engineer Inten
, USA
Aircraft Engineering Intern
Oxnard, USA