Senior Autonomy Software Engineer

Senior Autonomy Software Engineer

Los Angeles | $180k-$230k + equity | On-site

What happens when your autonomous vehicle loses GPS and communications?

It still needs to know where it is. It still needs to understand what’s around it and it still needs to make the right decision without asking anyone for help.

I’m recruiting for a small, well-funded defence robotics company in Los Angeles building autonomous underwater vehicles.

They’re looking for an engineer to help build the autonomy stack from the ground up.

Not maintain it. Not own one component of a mature system.

Build it.

You’ll work across perception, localisation, path and mission planning, obstacle avoidance and autonomous decision-making, running on constrained embedded compute.

Then you’ll put it on the vehicle and find out whether it actually works.

That means simulation, hardware integration, field debugging, pool testing and sea trials. The goal is to move from prototype towards autonomous missions lasting multiple days.

It’s the kind of role where the gap between a good algorithm and something that survives the real world matters.

Who could be a fit?

Someone who has already built autonomy, perception or robotics software for a physical system .

That could be a UAV, autonomous vehicle, robot, UUV or something adjacent.

Strong C++ and Python matter. Experience across planning, perception, localisation, sensor fusion, state estimation or computer vision is relevant. Jetson, CUDA and ROS are useful, but I’m more interested in what you’ve actually built and deployed than matching every technology.

You don't need an underwater background.

You do need to enjoy solving difficult problems without a mature stack or a huge team around you.

A few things worth knowing

• The engineering team is small. The pace is high. Ownership is broad.
• This is defence work, so you need to be comfortable with the end use.
• The role is five days on-site in Los Angeles , with relocation support potentially available.

$180k-$230k base + meaningful early-stage equity.

US citizenship or permanent residency is required due to export-control restrictions.

If you’ve built autonomy on real hardware and the idea of owning more of the problem appeals, I’d like to hear from you.