Senior Staff Engineer (Autonomy and Motion Planning) in London

This position on the Autonomy team in the UK will lead the delivery of autonomous behaviours into our products, acting as technical leads, senior individual contributors, and/or as team leads that are also hands-on contributors. We expect candidates to demonstrate unparalleled end-to-end outcome ownership, driving the architecting, design, delivery, support, and evolution of safe and effective mission autonomy software throughout the entire product lifecycle.

Key Responsibilities:

• Develop tactical autonomy software to enable unmanned platforms to perform complex missions across air, land, sea, and space domains with minimal human supervision.
• Implement and test behaviours that enable multi-agent coordination, target engagement, reconnaissance, and survivability in contested scenarios.
• Work throughout the entire software development lifecycle, from requirements capture through design, implementation, verification, and validation, utilising tools and workflows consistent with collaborative high-quality software development.
• Champion a product-line mindset in technology road-mapping and enable reuse of behaviours across multiple projects and portfolios.
• Utilise your software and systems expertise to architect behaviours as scalable software subsystems, interacting directly or indirectly with a breadth of system components (e.g., sensor processing, state estimation, peer-to-peer communications, contingency management, actuation, and payload interfacing).
• Leverage internal product and program-specific engineering teams to rapidly deliver state-of-the-art capabilities to vehicle platforms, with a clear path towards architecture and capability evolution over time.
• Collaborate with external teams, aligning on interfacing requirements between diverse systems, often working closely with vehicle integration teams and associated operational subject matter experts.
• Act as a subject matter expert for software engineering, representing software equities in a multi-stakeholder environment including engineering, business, and sales leadership.
• Travel to co-locate with end-users and/or other teams up to 20% of the time.

Qualifications:

• Proficient in production-level C++ software development.
• Desire to work in a highly collaborative, fast-paced, enthusiastic, and mission-centric environment.
• Proven ability to lead multi-disciplinary teams, set technical direction, and manage full project lifecycles from concept to deployment.
• Capacity to act as the technical owner for an entire software system, including stakeholder engagement, requirements definition, roadmap management, team coordination, design, implementation, sustainment, and evolution.
• Capacity to learn and grow individually, while mentoring junior team members effectively, building team cohesion and capacity.
• Experience with collaborative software development tools for version control, issue tracking, code reviews, and release management.
• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field.
• Eligible to obtain and maintain an active U.S. Secret security clearance.
• 7+ years’ experience in one or more of the following: software sub-system scheduling and integration, behaviour planning, task and resource allocation, motion planning, optimisation, or flight controls.
• Experience across a breadth of technology readiness levels (TRLs) and demonstration of bridging concepts from research-grade to operationally ready.
• Experience with mission systems integration, and ideally, hands-on experience supporting integration events and/or flight demonstrations.
• Experience across a multitude of application areas, including but not limited to: collaborative mission planning, behaviour planning, synchronized teaming, automated red force vs blue force tactics, motion planning across a variety of vehicle classes, kinematic constraints, and team compositions.
• Experience with FOSS software commonly used in robotic systems (e.g., ROS, OMPL, optimisation solvers).
• Familiarity with practical aspects of navigation and communications systems.
• Experience with simulation tools and environments (e.g., AFSIM, NGTS) for testing and validation.
• Familiarity with systems engineering methodologies.
• Familiarity with high-assurance software development processes (e.g., DO-178C or equivalent MIL-STD’s).

Benefits:

• Excellent Medical Coverage.
• Mental Health Employee Assistance Program.
• Paid Parental Leave.
• Pet Insurance.
• Flexible Work Hours.
• Onsite Gym (DC).
• Gym Discount (San Diego).
• Free Parking.
• Competitive Compensation.
• Stock Benefits.
• 401K Services and Match.