The Role

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.

Key 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.

Required Qualifications

• 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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.

ITAR Requirements

To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.