Staff Engineer (Autonomy and Motion Planning)

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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 to enable reuse of behaviours across multiple projects and portfolios.
• Utilise your software and systems expertise to architect behaviours as scalable software subsystems, that may interact 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 (whether internally and externally owned), 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 (e.g., fighter pilots, UAV operators, etc.).
• 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.

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

Qualifications

• Eligible to obtain and maintain an active U.S. Secret security clearance.
• 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.
• 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.
• Proficient in production-level C++ software development.
• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience with collaborative software development tools for version control, issue tracking, code reviews, and release management.
• Capacity to learn and grow individually, while mentoring junior team members effectively, building team cohesion and capacity.
• Desire to work in a highly collaborative, fast-paced, enthusiastic, and mission-centric environment.
• Experience across a breadth of technology readiness levels (TRLs) and demonstration of bridging concepts from research-grade to operationally ready.
• Experience across a multitude of application areas, including but not limited to:
• Experience with mission systems integration, and ideally, hands-on experience supporting integration events and/or flight demonstrations.
• 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.
• Weapons target assignment, sensor target pairing, sensor-centric control laws.
• Collision avoidance, geofencing, and safety-monitoring.
• Experience in more than one operational effect (e.g., strike, air combat, surveillance, reconnaissance, etc.) and more than one associated domain (e.g., air, space, maritime, ground, etc.).
• Experience with FOSS software that is commonly used in robotic systems (e.g., ROS, OMPL, optimisation solvers, etc.).
• Experience with simulation tools and environments (e.g., AFSIM, NGTS) for testing and validation.
• Familiarity with practical aspects of navigation and communications systems.
• Experience across the product delivery lifecycle, from emerging opportunity through system acceptance, deployment, and sustainment.
• Familiarity with systems engineering methodologies.
• Familiarity with high-assurance software development processes (e.g., DO-178C or equivalent MIL-STD’s).