Principal Engineer, Real-Time Visualization

Swarm Aero is redefining air power, building the largest swarming UAV and the most versatile swarming aircraft network in the world. The company is moving quickly to launch the first aircraft designed specifically for swarming, as well as the Command & Control software to mobilize swarms of thousands of heterogeneous autonomous assets and empower human operators to achieve superhuman results.

The team has created and exited multiple startups, negotiated defense deals worth billions of dollars, and designed and built 30+ novel aircraft, with aerospace experience from Scaled Composites, Airbus, Archer Aviation, Blue Origin, and Boom Supersonic.

Most frontend roles ask you to move pixels around a dashboard. This one asks you to own the interface that controls the largest drone swarm on the planet.

Legion is our Command & Control platform, and it's in operators' hands today. It lets a single operator plan, direct, and execute missions across a networked swarm of heterogeneous aircraft, in real time, over intermittent comms. Your job is to take the frontend through the next order of magnitude: more vehicles, harder missions, worse comms, at a scale nobody else in the industry is attempting.

This isn't CRUD. It's real-time, dense telemetry visualization, and interface design for a problem space that barely has prior art anywhere in the industry.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Own the frontend architecture for a C2 system directing swarms of heterogeneous aircraft, and take it from what works today to what has to work at scale
• Evolve our real-time, collaborative interfaces for controlling large numbers of aircraft simultaneously, including when comms degrade or drop entirely
• Design and ship new UI concepts for representing vehicle telemetry, sensor data, scheduling, crew resources, and data link management, much of it with no playbook to follow anywhere in the industry
• Work directly with the operators running Legion today, and close the loop from mission feedback back into the interface
• Set the frontend architecture, patterns, and standards the rest of the team builds on, and decide which of our current patterns survive the next generation
• Ship early, ship often, backed by strong CI/CD, QA, and DevSecOps

WHAT YOU'VE DONE

• Degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience
• 8+ years building complex, production frontend applications, with a track record of owning frontend architecture
• Deep experience building production web interfaces with React or a comparable modern framework
• Experience mentoring engineers and setting technical direction for a frontend team

WHAT SETS YOU APART

• Experience with both immediate mode (games, simulation) and retained mode UI paradigms
• A track record with performance-sensitive application development
• Familiarity with video streaming protocols
• Good UI/UX instincts
• WebGL/OpenGL experience
• Experience with geospatial applications

WHY THIS ROLE

You'll be one of the earliest engineers shaping how humans command autonomous systems at scale, work that's currently being defined in real time, by a small team, with your fingerprints on the architecture. If you want to build the future of human-swarm interaction rather than maintain someone else's, this is that seat.

ITAR requirement

To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.

What We Offer

• Meaningful equity in a high-growth defense technology company
• Competitive base salary commensurate with experience
• Medical, dental, vision, and 401k
• PTO and paid sick leave
• Monthly wellness stipend
• Daily catered lunch (office)
• Paid parental leave
• Direct impact on a critical national security mission
• A world-class team of engineers and operators solving genuinely hard problems