Software Engineer, Autonomous Systems

What we're looking for

We need a software engineer with 5+ years of experience in autonomous systems or robotics who has strong C++ skills and hands-on experience developing autonomy software that runs on real vehicles. You should be comfortable working across the autonomy stack — perception, localization, planning, decision-making, and vehicle behavior — and have a track record of shipping production-quality algorithms on physical hardware. Bonus points if you've worked in autonomous driving, aerospace, defense, or maritime systems.

What you'll do

• Design, implement, and deploy production autonomy software in C++ that runs onboard Saildrone's autonomous maritime vehicles
• Develop and integrate algorithms for autonomous perception, localization, planning, navigation, decision-making, and collision/terrain avoidance
• Contribute to sensor fusion work — integrating radar, camera, and other sensor modalities into a unified data stream for situational awareness and path planning
• Build and maintain local and global planners that consume map data and sensor data to determine optimal routes and vehicle behavior
• Evaluate algorithmic approaches and make practical tradeoffs among accuracy, robustness, computational cost, latency, and reliability on constrained onboard compute (Nvidia Jetson)
• Use simulation, testing, telemetry, and real-world vehicle data to validate autonomous behavior and diagnose failures — including building your own tooling (often in Python) to accelerate the development cycle
• Contribute to the architecture and evolution of Saildrone's next-generation autonomy stack as part of a multi-year roadmap to expand autonomous capabilities