Staff Engineer, Autonomy Capabilities – Maritime
Leads development and integration of advanced maritime autonomy for USVs, UUVs, and cooperating UAVs, including motion planning, localization, safety, and multi-agent coordination. Requires staff-level technical leadership, substantial robotics experience, C++ and Python proficiency, and eligibility for a SECRET clearance.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Lead technical delivery of complex autonomy capabilities for maritime platforms.
- Develop advanced motion-planning and safety-constrained maneuvering for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs).
- Build passive and active localization and tracking capabilities using sensor fusion, observability-aware maneuvering, and single- or multi-agent sensor networks.
- Develop safe autonomous behaviors, runtime assurance, COLREGS-compliant operations, and operator-trust features.
- Create distributed optimization and task-allocation approaches for heterogeneous multi-agent teams.
- Develop high-performance, well-tested software modules with clear interfaces for mid-to-high Technology Readiness Level insertions.
- Collaborate with perception, planning, simulation, hardware, and operational-test teams to integrate autonomy solutions onto real-world platforms.
- Deploy capabilities to surface vehicles, support integration and demonstration events, analyze mission logs, and validate operational performance.
- Research and prototype algorithms, identify tactical capability gaps, and contribute to autonomy roadmaps.
- Travel approximately 25% of the year to offices, customer sites, and integration events.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Typically 7 years of related experience with a bachelor’s degree, 6 years with a master’s degree, or 4 years with a PhD, or equivalent experience.
- Proficiency in C++ and Python, with familiarity with real-time operating systems.
- Significant experience with robotics technologies involving motion planning, behavior modeling, decision-making, or autonomous system design.
- Significant experience with unmanned systems and related algorithms.
- Experience with simulation environments such as AFSIM and NGTS.
- Strong problem-solving, troubleshooting, and system-optimization skills.
- Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance.
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience across multiple aerospace domains, including air, land, sea, or space.
- Experience spanning classical control, optimization, and applied machine learning or reinforcement learning.
- Background in collaborative behaviors and swarm robotics.
- Familiarity with defense or government programs.
- Hands-on experience supporting integration events, customer demonstrations, or live exercises.
Skills
C++, Python, Rtos, Motion Planning, Robotics, Sensor Fusion, Optimization, Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Swarm Robotics, Afsim, Ngts, Colregs, Multi-Agent Systems, Simulation
Similar jobs
ML Engineering jobs
Ironclad
San Francisco, CA
Leads architecture and technical direction for agentic search systems combining LLMs, retrieval, and content-understanding pipelines for contract intelligence. The role requires 10+ years building production systems, deep search or LLM expertise, and strong cross-team technical leadership.
Idme
Mountain View, CA
Leads the engineering discipline for evaluating, testing, and monitoring production AI agents, while building scalable eval infrastructure and developer tooling. Requires 8+ years of production software experience, strong backend skills, and expertise with LLM evaluation and agentic systems.
Airbnb
United States
Staff machine learning engineer leading scalable ranking, search, recommendation, and personalization systems. The role requires 9+ years of applied machine learning experience, strong programming and data engineering skills, and expertise productionizing models and pipelines.
Airbnb
United States
Architects and operates production machine-learning systems that classify web and API traffic, detect bots and scrapers, and support real-time mitigation at internet edge latency. The role requires 9+ years of applied ML experience in adversarial domains and strong expertise in evaluation, data pipelines, and large-scale systems.
Harvey
San Francisco, CA
Leads the design and operation of reliable, scalable model infrastructure powering AI inference across multiple providers. Requires 7+ years of distributed-systems engineering experience, strong programming skills, and expertise in production reliability and cloud infrastructure.