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autonomous surface vessels · maritime security

Robotics Software Engineer

Los AngelesPosted 2 months ago
Software engineeringMid-level
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Opens the source posting on ycombinator.com

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Robotics Software Engineer (Autonomy)

We're looking for a Robotics Software Engineer to help advance our autonomous maritime systems. Our autonomy stack is already deployed and operating in real-world environments—you'll help extend its capabilities, improve performance in increasingly challenging conditions, and scale collaborative autonomy from small coordinated teams to large, multi-domain autonomous operations.

What It's Like to Work Here

We're a fast-paced engineering team that believes the best products are built by testing early, iterating often, and shipping quickly. Engineers have a high degree of ownership and work across the entire product lifecycle—from idea to deployment.

Field testing is a core part of how we build. We prefer to be on the water daily, validating new features, observing operators, and seeing our systems perform in real-world conditions. That direct connection between engineering and field operations helps us make better design decisions, move faster, and build products that solve real problems.

What You'll Work On

  • Improve and extend our existing autonomy stack for unmanned maritime systems.

  • Advance autonomous navigation in increasingly dynamic and congested waterways.

  • Improve path planning, decision making, and obstacle avoidance in complex real-world environments.

  • Help scale collaborative autonomy from today's small coordinated teams to large, heterogeneous fleets operating across maritime and multi-domain platforms.

  • Develop autonomy that enables operators to confidently manage increasingly capable autonomous teams.

  • Integrate heterogeneous sensor data to improve localization, perception, and autonomous decision-making.

  • Optimize autonomy software for reliable, low-latency execution on edge compute platforms.

  • Build robust deployment infrastructure for vehicles operating continuously in the field.

  • Collaborate closely with perception, controls, frontend, and hardware engineers to rapidly prototype, test, and deploy new capabilities.

Requirements

  • Strong experience with robotics, autonomous systems, or motion planning.

  • Experience implementing mathematical path planning algorithms (A*, Graph Search, RRT, Potential Fields, MPC, or similar).

  • Strong software development skills in C++, Python, or similar languages.

  • Experience developing on Linux-based embedded systems (Yocto experience is a plus).

  • Experience integrating multiple sensors such as cameras, radar, LiDAR, GPS, and IMUs.

  • Understanding of localization, perception, navigation, and autonomous decision-making.

  • Experience deploying and optimizing software on edge compute platforms.

  • Familiarity with Git, CI/CD, and modern software engineering practices.

  • Nice to Have

  • Experience with ROS2, NVIDIA Jetson, NVIDIA Holoscan, CUDA, or GPU-accelerated computing.

  • Experience developing autonomy for USVs, UGVs, UAVs, or other robotic platforms.

  • Experience with collaborative autonomy, multi-agent systems, or swarm robotics.

  • Experience operating autonomous systems in real-world environments.

  • Experience with distributed software deployment and embedded testing frameworks.

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