Senior/Staff Autonomy Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

About the Company

This aerospace startup is reshaping how the world connects from above. The team is developing solar-powered, long-endurance UAVs that operate at the edge of the atmosphere, delivering next-generation, low-latency communication capabilities to areas traditional satellite and ground-based networks cannot serve well. The vision is to redefine global connectivity for everything from underserved regions and disaster response to dynamic, mission-critical coverage.

Backed by top-tier investors and led by a tight team of operators and engineers from the most respected names in aerospace, defense, and telecom, this is a rare ground-floor opportunity. They are lean, builder-led, and moving fast toward a near-term flight demonstration.

This team has the technical depth, the network, and the timing to leap past incumbents and define the category. 

Onsite - South San Francisco, CA. 

About the Role

We're hiring a Senior Autonomy Engineer (Staff for an exceptional profile) to own the design, architecture, and development of the entire autonomy stack across the vehicle, payload, and ground infrastructure. You'll report to our Head of GNC and work directly with our CTO. This is an individual-contributor role with full architectural ownership and no direct reports near term. It is not a maintenance seat: you'll define the autonomy platform from the ground up and watch your code fly.

Your First 6 Months

- Ship the autonomy block for our stratospheric demo mission, starting with hardened waypoint navigation that handles operator error gracefully.
- Stand up the simulation and analysis tooling the team will rely on long term.
- Contribute to logging and log reprocessing in our software framework.

What You'll Own

• End-to-end autonomy architecture across vehicle, payload, and ground infrastructure for a long-endurance, high-altitude aircraft

• Mission management and behavioral executive: design the high-level state machines, behavior trees, and contingency logic that govern mission phases, abort behaviors, fault response, and payload coordination.

• Path and trajectory planning: build the algorithms for auto-takeoff, landing, dynamic waypoint navigation, geofencing, and end-to-end autonomous routing. Scale toward cooperative and non-cooperative avoidance and energy-aware planning that accounts for battery state of charge, expected solar harvest, and predicted spatial wind fields.

• Health, status, and fault detection: design robust fault detection and isolation that distinguishes healthy from faulty sensors and actuators, monitors system health, and triggers safe contingency behaviors on board in real time.

• Fleet management and simulation: build the centralized software that coordinates multiple vehicles across multiple sites, and stand up the cloud infrastructure for large-scale distributed simulation and log analysis.

• Infrastructure and testing: design and optimize CI/CD pipelines for autonomy software, drive SIL and HIL validation, and own flight readiness for early prototypes.

What We're Looking For

• You have personally designed and shipped planning and mission logic (state machines, behavior trees, path or trajectory planning) on a real vehicle operating in 3D or dynamic environments, such as aircraft, drones, or marine vehicles, and not just in simulation.

• You built bespoke autonomy rather than configuring an off-the-shelf stack like PX4 or ArduPilot.

• You write production C++ or Rust today. Our stack is Rust; strong C++ engineers who want to learn it are very welcome.

• Embedded software experience on complex hardware. Flying vehicles preferred; robotics, autonomous ground or marine systems, and other high-stakes hardware count.

• Broad systems-architecture instincts across embedded vehicle software, ground systems, and cloud-based tooling.

• Flight-dynamics literacy: you can read flight logs and reason about why the aircraft behaves the way it does, not just whether mission logic responded correctly. You don't need to be a controls engineer, since our Head of GNC owns dynamics and control.

• You move fast in ambiguity and reach for first principles when no standard exists for the problem.

• You must be eligible to work with export-controlled (ITAR/EAR) technology. US citizenship is not required.

Benefits

Why You'll Love Working Here

• Join a powerhouse team of brilliant builders

• Collaborate with a tight-knit crew of deeply technical operators and engineers from the most respected programs in aerospace, defense, and telecom. You will work alongside founders and leaders with a track record of shipping at the highest bar.

• Competitive startup salary

• Be paid well to do the most energizing work of your career.

• Ground-floor equity

• Own meaningful upside from day one. Shape the trajectory of the company and participate fully in the value you help create.

• Excellent health insurance

• Strong medical coverage so you can stay healthy while pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

• Dog-friendly office with Bay views

• Bring your pup and enjoy a beautiful workspace with panoramic water views that spark creativity and focus.

• Work on a uniquely hard problem

• Architect autonomy for an aircraft that lives at the edge of the atmosphere, where the wind is often faster than the vehicle and every kilogram, watt, and line of code matters. This is the kind of problem that nerd-snipes the best autonomy engineers in the world.

About AdAstra

AdAstra Talent Advisors is a headhunting and talent advising firm focused on the Climate, Space, and Defense sectors of Hard Tech. We specialize in pairing highly technical and executive talent with some of the world’s leading Hard Tech startups.

At AdAstra, we catalyze the innovations that future generations depend on by placing the right people in the right seats. Our dedicated work enables inconceivable technology from Earth, to the stars. And it’s all because of trailblazing talent like you - those driven to do what’s never been done before. 

We care about long term relationships with both candidates and companies. Even if the role we initially discuss isn’t a perfect fit, it’s likely we’ll have something relevant to share with you in the future. 

Join us on our journey by following along via LinkedIn!

CEO, Seyka Mejeur | LinkedIn profile

CTO / COO, Brian Mejeur | LinkedIn profile

AdAstra Talent Advisors | LinkedIn profile

AdAstra Website