Senior Staff Software Engineer (Autonomy)

Location: San Mateo, California; on-site. Travel to office locations, customer sites, and flight integration events is typically 10–15% of the year.

Company

hirify.global develops autonomy capabilities for unmanned platforms operating across air, land, sea, and space domains.

What you will do

• Design tactical autonomy algorithms for unmanned aircraft performing complex missions with minimal human supervision.
• Develop high-performance software for planning, decision-making, and behavior execution in dynamic and adversarial environments.
• Implement and test behavior architectures for multi-agent coordination, target engagement, reconnaissance, and survivability.
• Integrate classical autonomy and machine learning methods, including reinforcement learning, into robust adaptive systems.
• Collaborate with perception, planning, simulation, hardware, and flight-test teams to integrate autonomy solutions onto real platforms.
• Deploy capabilities to operational platforms, participate in field tests and flight demonstrations, and analyze mission data to improve system performance.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, electrical, mechanical, aerospace engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• At least 10 years of related experience with a bachelor’s degree, 9 years with a master’s degree, or 7 years with a PhD.
• Proficiency in C++ and Python, with familiarity with real-time operating systems.
• Significant experience with robotics, motion planning, behavior modeling, decision-making, autonomous systems, and unmanned aircraft technologies.
• Experience with simulation environments such as AFSIM or NGTS, as well as troubleshooting and performance optimization.
• Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance.

Nice to have

• Experience applying machine learning or reinforcement learning in autonomy pipelines.
• Experience with swarm robotics, collaborative behaviors, or distributed decision-making.
• Experience with DoD or government programs, flight demonstrations, live exercises, or behaviors for air, ground, and maritime vehicles.
• Experience with UCI and OMS standards.

Culture & Benefits

• Work spans multidisciplinary programs and diverse integration contexts.
• Collaboration includes perception, planning, simulation, hardware, and flight-test disciplines.
• The role combines autonomy research and prototyping with near-term deployment on real-world platforms.
• Travel is required for customer sites, office locations, and flight integration events.