Senior Autonomous Behavior Engineer

RED CAT HOLDINGS•San Diego, CA

4d•$120,000 - $200,000•Onsite

About The Position

Apium Swarm Robotics (ASR) is revolutionizing swarm autonomy software for air, surface, undersea, and ground vehicles operating across dual-use commercial and defense environments. Our systems are deployed on real platforms, tested in the field, and delivered to customers operating in complex, uncertain, and safety-critical conditions. We do not build research prototypes or slideware. Our software is integrated into real vehicles, tested in the field, and delivered to customers who depend on operational reliability, speed of execution, and mission relevance. We prioritize performance over hype. ASR systems represent the next phase in autonomy: collaborative swarming. These are not like pre-programmed drones for light shows. We are creating real-time cooperative management that lets one operator control dozens to hundreds of vehicles in real-time with the ease of controlling a single vehicle. As such, this role requires comfort with responsibility, ambiguity, and operational accountability. ASR seeks a Senior Autonomous Behavior Engineer to build the next generation of swarm behaviors that define what ASR’s drones do once they’re in the air. This is a deeply technical individual contributor role focused on the conceptual, algorithmic, and software work of taking a customer use case and translating it into a deployable behavior — from initial whiteboard through simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and field validation with live drones. You will work backwards from operational scenarios identified by ASR’s mission engineers, customers, field teams, or fellow software engineers. A typical engagement looks like this: a mission engineer returns from a customer exercise with a new swarm mission concept; you sit with them to extract the underlying operational logic; you decompose that into the autonomy primitives; and you build, test, and ship it. Your output is behaviors that are robust enough to survive field conditions, not just demos that work on a clean simulator. A core part of the role is partnering with the UI/UX team to define how each behavior is operated. For every new behavior you build, you will specify the levers and knobs that operators need exposed in the ground station, agree on naming and semantics, and ensure the operator workflow is buildable before the behavior is locked. You will do the same for ASR’s API surface, ensuring partner-integrated UIs — TAK plugins, customer C2 systems, third-party planning tools — can task and control your behaviors cleanly. You will own behavior testing across simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, and live flight, partnering with QA and Test engineers to define the test configurations and scenario coverage that get built into ASR’s CI/CD pipeline and that Mission Engineers run prior to customer demonstrations. You will also serve as an internal advocate for behavior-development velocity: you will identify refinements and optimizations to the core autonomy codebase that would make future behaviors faster and easier to construct, and you will bring those recommendations to the core software engineering team.

Requirements

Must be a US Citizen
7+ years of professional experience in robotics, autonomy, modeling and simulation, or a closely related technical domain
Strong proficiency in C++
Demonstrated experience designing and implementing autonomous behaviors for ground, air, surface, or subsurface platforms — not just integrating existing ones
Strong foundation in linear algebra and vector math (required), including coordinate transforms, plus working knowledge of optimization or control theory and applied probability
Comfort with the full behavior-development lifecycle from concept through field validation, including the testing rigor required to make something work outside a clean simulator
Demonstrated ability to work from operational use-case requirements (not just from technical specifications), translating “the operator wants the drones to do X under Y conditions” into deployable code
Daily working experience with a simulation environment such as Gazebo, ROS, AirSim, custom SITL, or comparable
Strong written communication, including the ability to document behavior interfaces and API surfaces so other engineers and partner teams can integrate against them
Ability to work effectively within a cross-functional team alongside mission engineers, UI/UX engineers, firmware and hardware engineers, and field operations

Nice To Haves

Graduate degree (MS or PhD) in Robotics, Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, Operations Research, or a related field
Background in Modeling, Virtual Environments & Simulation (MOVES) or an equivalent M&S-focused graduate program for simulations or gaming
Experience with multi-agent systems, swarm autonomy, or distributed decision-making algorithms
Familiarity with TAK (Team Awareness Kit), CoT (Cursor on Target), or comparable tactical command-and-control messaging standards
Experience with MAVLink, PX4, ArduPilot, or comparable autopilot ecosystems
Familiarity with behavior trees, finite state machines, or hierarchical task planning as autonomy formalisms
Experience with formal methods, scenario-based testing, or other rigorous verification approaches for autonomy
Experience designing automated test infrastructure for autonomy or robotics, including parameter-sweep frameworks, scenario libraries, or simulation-based tests integrated into a CI/CD pipeline
Experience with field testing of robotic or autonomous systems, including first-flight discipline and post-flight analysis
Familiarity with reinforcement learning, learned policies, or hybrid classical-and-learned autonomy approaches
Video game programming experience (Unity, Unreal, or custom engines), which demonstrates the ability to build, simulate, and reason about behavior in virtual worlds
U.S. security clearance or ability to obtain one

Responsibilities

Design, implement, and field-validate new autonomous behaviors for ASR’s swarm platform, working from customer use cases through deployment
Partner with mission engineers, customers, and field teams to extract operational requirements and decompose them into the autonomy primitives the system actually needs
Collaborate with the UI/UX team to define operator levers, knobs, and workflows for each behavior, agreeing on naming and semantics before the behavior is locked
Define and document the API surface for each behavior so that partner-integrated UIs (TAK plugins, customer C2 systems, third-party planning tools) can task and control it cleanly
Build and run simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, and live-flight tests for every behavior, with quantitative pass/fail criteria
Maintain and extend ASR’s behavior library, including documentation, parameter tuning interfaces, and regression test coverage
Partner with QA and Test engineers to define behavior-specific test configurations, parameter sweeps, and scenario coverage, ensuring this coverage is built into ASR’s CI/CD pipeline and made available for Mission Engineers to run on pre-demonstration test flights
Contribute to architectural decisions about the broader autonomy stack, including primitive selection, behavior composition, and behavior arbitration
Identify and recommend refinements and optimizations to the core autonomy codebase that would improve the velocity, fluidity, and reliability of future behavior development, partnering with core software engineers to drive those improvements forward
Support field exercises and customer demonstrations where new behaviors are flown for the first time