Principal Engineer, Edge Applications & Mission Systems

Location: San Diego, California, United States; on-site

Company

hirify.global develops autonomous systems and AI-powered technologies for defense and mission operations.

What you will do

• Own the architecture of an edge application platform connecting operators, autonomous platforms, mission data, and external command-and-control systems.
• Guide the evolution of ground control, multi-vehicle supervision, heterogeneous fleet operations, and theater-level mission planning applications.
• Define APIs, SDKs, shared data models, extension mechanisms, and integration tooling for customers and partners.
• Lead interoperability with defense C2 and battle-management systems, including exchange of vehicle state, mission information, sensor data, and operational context.
• Design fleet and configuration management capabilities covering readiness, health monitoring, versioning, compatibility, updates, rollback, and traceability.
• Drive the technical roadmap from customer requirements through deployment, acceptance, sustainment, and product improvements.

Requirements

• 15+ years of professional software engineering experience or equivalent technical depth and impact.
• 5+ years of technical leadership as a technical lead, architect, Principal Engineer, or equivalent.
• Deep experience developing defense ground control and command-and-control applications, including mission planning, execution, operator workflows, and battle-management integration.
• Record of shipping and sustaining defense software products through operational deployment, customer acceptance, and field-informed improvement.
• Strong experience with software architecture, distributed systems, application services, APIs, data management, edge deployments, and networked systems.
• Bachelor’s or advanced degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Robotics, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with Lattice or other extensible defense C2/BMS and mission-management platforms.
• Experience with multi-domain operations, heterogeneous autonomous fleets, and tactical-to-higher-echelon mission systems.
• Experience delivering agentic or AI-assisted applications, human-machine teaming, workflow orchestration, and operator supervision.
• Experience with geospatial applications, common operational pictures, mission rehearsal, telemetry replay, or post-mission analysis.
• Experience with secure software delivery in defense environments and collaboration with cybersecurity and authorization teams.

Culture & Benefits

• Direct involvement in architecture, critical implementation work, and technical problem-solving.
• Cross-functional collaboration with autonomy, AI, product, design, integration, test, field, and customer teams.
• Work focused on resilient software behavior under intermittent connectivity, constrained bandwidth and compute, and partial failures.