Staff Software Engineer, Autonomous Pilot Integration – Expeditionary (C++)

Location: On-site in Washington, DC; Boston, MA; San Diego, California; or Dallas, Texas. Travel of approximately 10–20% is expected for office visits, customer sites, operator training, flight tests, and integration exercises.

Company

hirify.global develops autonomy solutions for unmanned aircraft and defense customers.

What you will do

• Lead technical execution of complex autonomy capabilities from architecture through field deployment.
• Integrate mission autonomy, payloads, flight-control interfaces, executive autonomy, and multi-agent behaviors onto V-BAT and X-BAT.
• Define integration approaches and resolve interface issues with the Aircraft team.
• Drive systems architecture, interface design, integration strategy, and C2 interoperability using open-systems standards.
• Lead design reviews, contribute to interface control documents, mentor engineers, and improve engineering practices.
• Drive release readiness and support flight tests, customer demonstrations, operational deployments, integration workflows, and testing infrastructure.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in a relevant engineering discipline, or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of relevant professional experience.
• Expert-level C++ and Linux development experience.
• Experience leading complex autonomy or embedded software integration efforts.
• Experience influencing technical direction across multiple engineering teams and supporting operational test events or customer deployments.
• Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance.

Nice to have

• Experience with Group 3 UAS or VTOL aircraft and custom autopilot integration.
• Experience integrating EO/IR or ViDAR systems and supporting long-endurance ISR missions.
• Docker, ARM embedded systems, and CI/CD experience.
• Experience mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives.

Culture & Benefits

• Work spans software, hardware, and operations in an expeditionary defense environment.
• Collaborate with Aircraft, Autonomy Capabilities, Perception, GCS, Strategic Systems, feature crews, and customer stakeholders.
• Support real-hardware integration, flight testing, customer demonstrations, and operational deployments.
• Work on V-BAT and X-BAT unmanned aircraft platforms for ISR, target acquisition, communications, and multi-agent missions.