Senior Systems Software Engineer

NODA AI•Austin, TX

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

NODA is a veteran-owned, venture-backed technology company transforming how unmanned systems collaborate in complex, mission-critical environments. As NODA scales across products, partners, and deployment environments, keeping the system coherent in practice — not just on paper — is what separates a platform that works in the field from one that only works in a demo. Our Systems Software Engineers are the people who can stand at the seam between subsystems — software, networking, RF, and hardware — and make sense of what's actually happening when something breaks in degraded, contested, or denied conditions. You won't be the deepest RF, networking, or hardware specialist in the room, but you'll be able to hold your own in that conversation, pinpoint where in the stack a problem actually lives, and write the software — or pick up a multimeter — needed to prove it.

Requirements

5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant time debugging distributed, real-time, or multi-service systems in production
Strong proficiency in C++ and/or Python, with the ability to write production-quality software with architect-level supervision on system design
Experience with real-time or low-latency messaging/middleware (e.g., DDS, ROS/ROS2, ZeroMQ, MQTT, gRPC) in distributed or multi-agent contexts
Solid working knowledge of networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, multicast, basic routing) sufficient to debug connectivity/performance issues and converse credibly with networking engineers
Working familiarity — conversational depth plus basic debugging, not specialist design work — with RF/wireless concepts (link quality, interference, basic link budget reasoning)
Comfortable using basic hardware bench tools (multimeter, oscilloscope) to debug at the hardware/software boundary
Demonstrated ability to debug across layers — application, network, RF, and hardware-adjacent — and to know when to pull in a specialist versus solve it directly
Experience with Linux systems and command-line debugging tooling
U.S. Citizenship with the ability to obtain a security clearance

Nice To Haves

Experience operating or debugging systems in contested/denied conditions (jamming, intermittent links, degraded bandwidth)
Experience with Linux-based or real-time systems in resource-constrained, embedded, or edge environments (embedded Linux, bare-metal, RTOS)
Familiarity with containerization for edge deployment (Docker/K8s) and observability tooling (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, or similar)
Experience with simulation, HIL/SIL pipelines, or sim-to-field validation workflows
Familiarity with security considerations in tactical comms or cross-domain solutions
Prior work in defense, aerospace, or other mission-critical/regulated environments
Experience authoring ICDs, requirements traceability, or MBSE artifacts
Exposure to tactical radios, MANET, or mesh networking in a support/integration capacity

Responsibilities

Debug and resolve cross-system issues spanning software, real-time messaging, networking, RF, and hardware — owning the investigation even when the root cause sits outside your primary depth
Pinpoint performance and latency issues in cross-system infrastructure (messaging fabric, gateway, runtime) supporting multi-agent coordination, and drive them to resolution
Write and maintain software stacks under a systems architect's supervision, for work outside Core Engineering sub-teams' product ownership
Investigate and characterize system behavior under degraded, intermittent, or contested link conditions
Perform hands-on hardware diagnostics using basic bench tools (multimeter, oscilloscope) to isolate issues at the hardware/software boundary
Hold credible technical conversations with networking, RF, and hardware SMEs — translate their findings into system-level constraints and software fixes
Contribute to System Health: performance baselining, system-level verification, crash analysis to root cause, and KPI/dashboard evidence used for release go/no-go decisions, with a focus on driving measurable improvements in latency, reliability, and uptime
Identify and mitigate cross-system risks impacting mission effectiveness, including in live exercises or deployments
Support integration tooling, CI/CD for cross-system components, and automated regression in SIL/HIL environments
Maintain Interface Control Documents and integration contracts between major platform components, and translate field/operational requirements into system constraints Core Engineering and architects can build against
Build observability into cross-system components (logging, tracing, metrics) to make the next debugging pass faster