Software Engineer, Mission Autonomy

Mach Industries•Huntington Beach, CA

1d•$130,000 - $230,000

About The Position

Mach Industries is seeking a Software Engineer, Mission Autonomy to develop the software that translates mission objectives and operator goals into reliable autonomous behavior. You will design and implement mission-planning, decision-making, task-execution, and contingency-management capabilities for Mach’s autonomous aerial platforms. Your work will connect high-level mission intent with vehicle autonomy, flight software, perception, communications, payloads, and ground-control systems. This is a broad software-engineering role for someone comfortable working across system boundaries. You should be able to write production-quality C++ and Python, reason about complex autonomous behavior, debug integrated software and vehicle systems, and take capabilities from initial concept through simulation, flight test, and operational deployment.

Requirements

Strong software-engineering skills in modern C++ and Python.
Experience developing production software on Linux.
Experience developing software for autonomous systems, robotics, or aerospace platforms.
Hands-on experience implementing one or more mission-autonomy capabilities, such as task planning, behavior trees, state machines, hierarchical planning, decision-making, mission execution, or contingency management.
Strong understanding of software architecture, interfaces, concurrency, data flow, and system-level debugging.
Ability to write clean, testable, maintainable, and well-documented software.
Experience taking software from prototype through integration, testing, and deployment on real hardware.
Ability to diagnose failures using logs, telemetry, simulation results, and observed system behavior.
Strong technical ownership and the ability to work effectively across multiple engineering disciplines.
Clear written and verbal communication skills.
Strong engineering judgment and integrity when balancing mission effectiveness, safety, reliability, latency, resource constraints, and operational simplicity.

Nice To Haves

Three or more years of professional experience developing software for autonomous vehicles, UAVs, robotics, aerospace, or defense systems.
Experience with autonomous aerial vehicles or optionally piloted aircraft.
Experience designing mission planners, behavior trees, executive systems, task schedulers, or autonomy state machines.
Experience with multi-agent systems, collaborative autonomy, distributed task allocation, or swarm coordination.
Familiarity with guidance, navigation, controls, state estimation, perception, or motion planning sufficient to integrate effectively with those systems.
Experience designing software for intermittent, bandwidth-constrained, degraded, or denied communications environments.
Experience with fault detection, graceful degradation, abort logic, recovery behaviors, and safety-critical state management.
Experience deploying software on embedded Linux systems, edge computers, or resource-constrained platforms.
Experience with simulation, software-in-the-loop testing, hardware-in-the-loop testing, scenario generation, Monte Carlo testing, or automated mission evaluation.
Experience building ground-control, command-and-control, or human-machine-interface software.
Experience participating in flight testing, range operations, or field deployment of experimental systems and working through the practical challenges of real-world operations.
Experience with Rust, particularly for systems programming, embedded software, or safety- and performance-critical applications.

Responsibilities

Design, implement, test, and deploy mission-autonomy software using modern C++
Use Python to develop tooling for analysis, simulation, test automation, and mission evaluation.
Develop software for mission planning, task sequencing, behavior orchestration, state management, and autonomous mission execution.
Build decision-making and contingency-management systems that respond appropriately to vehicle health, sensor availability, communications loss, environmental changes, and mission updates.
Translate concepts of operation, mission objectives, system requirements, and test objectives into well-defined autonomous behaviors and software interfaces.
Integrate mission software with flight controls, navigation, perception, payloads, communications, ground-control systems, and operator interfaces.
Design clear and reliable interfaces between high-level mission logic and lower-level vehicle capabilities.
Develop systems that continue operating effectively when communications, GNSS, sensing, or other resources are degraded or unavailable.
Support multi-vehicle mission execution, distributed coordination, and collaborative behaviors where applicable.
Build simulation scenarios, software-in-the-loop tests, hardware-in-the-loop tests, mission replays, and automated regression tests.
Define mission-level measures of performance and develop evaluation tooling for mission completion, timing, robustness, fault recovery, resource utilization, and operator workload.
Analyze telemetry, logs, test results, and flight data to identify failures, improve behavior, and drive rapid iteration.
Work closely with flight software, GNC, perception, systems engineering, ground-control, flight-test, and hardware teams to deliver complete vehicle capabilities.
Participate in ground and flight testing, including debugging integrated systems in field environments.
Contribute to software architecture, code reviews, development practices, technical documentation, and continuous integration.