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Havoc AI, founded in 2024 and headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island, is a leader in all-domain collaborative autonomy. The company develops software-defined hardware that powers military and commercial-grade autonomous systems across sea, air, and land, enabling assets to sense, decide, and act together in complex and contested environments.
You will architect, build, and scale the real-time geospatial interfaces that operators use to command autonomous systems. Operators interact with autonomous vehicles through a live interface where position, telemetry, and system state continuously flow into a common operational picture. The decisions made through that interface directly affect vehicles operating in the real world.
This is a deeply technical individual contributor role with no direct reports. You will work closely with the Head of Frontend and senior engineers to shape frontend architecture and technical direction while remaining hands-on with the most difficult engineering problems. You will have significant influence through architecture, technical leadership, mentorship, and the quality of the systems you build.
Key responsibilities include:
- Architect and build frontend systems capable of handling high-frequency, real-time data at scale, establishing production-ready patterns for data ingestion, transformation, state management, and rendering.
- Design transport-to-render architectures that prevent high-frequency telemetry from overwhelming the UI, implementing strategies for batching, throttling, caching, workers, and state isolation.
- Design predictable behavior for intermittent or degraded connectivity, including reconnection, state reconciliation, and offline tolerance.
- Guide the architecture and evolution of real-time geospatial interfaces, designing scalable approaches to map layers, feature identity, interaction state, rendering, and lifecycle management.
- Build performant experiences for large and continuously changing geospatial datasets, optimizing rendering as tracked entities, telemetry rates, and visual complexity increase.
- Profile and optimize browser performance across rendering, memory, CPU, network, and GPU workloads using measurement and profiling to guide architectural decisions.
- Partner with the Head of Frontend on architecture, technical strategy, and major scaling decisions while remaining hands-on with implementation.
- Set a high bar for code quality, architecture, testing, maintainability, and performance through design reviews and technical proposals.
- Mentor senior engineers in real-time systems, geospatial engineering, performance, and frontend architecture.
Within your first 12 months, you will establish a frontend architecture capable of supporting significantly greater numbers of autonomous assets and telemetry streams, improve performance and reliability of geospatial interfaces, establish scalable patterns for real-time data ingestion and state management, identify and address architectural risks, and raise the technical bar across the frontend organization.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 10+ years of frontend engineering experience, including significant experience operating at Staff, Principal, or equivalent technical scope
- Deep production experience building and scaling high-volume, real-time applications
- Expert-level experience with React and TypeScript, including first-principles understanding of React's rendering model and frontend performance
- Deep experience building map-based geospatial applications using MapLibre, Mapbox GL, Deck.gl, or equivalent technologies
- Demonstrated experience optimizing large and dynamic geospatial feature sets
- Hands-on experience scaling a real-time application through significant growth in tracked entities, update frequency, or data volume
- Experience with multiple real-time communication technologies such as WebSockets, MQTT, gRPC-web, SSE, or similar protocols
- Deep browser performance expertise across rendering, memory, CPU, networking, and GPU bottlenecks
- Experience designing client-side data architectures using workers, batching, caching, state boundaries, and other techniques for isolating high-frequency workloads
- Experience designing applications for degraded or intermittent connectivity, including reconnection and state reconciliation
- Strong software architecture and systems-design fundamentals
- Demonstrated ability to make sound technical tradeoffs and sequence architectural changes within a production system
- Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to influence technical direction without relying on formal authority
- High ownership and comfort operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous engineering environment
NICE TO HAVE:
- Experience taking an internal operational tool and evolving it into a scalable, multi-tenant product
- Deep data visualization experience using D3, custom charting, or large-dataset visualization technologies
- Experience with WebGL, Three.js, custom shaders, terrain visualization, or 3D geospatial applications
- Experience with autonomous systems, robotics, command-and-control software, or real-time operational platforms
- Experience in defense, aerospace, robotics, or other mission- or safety-critical environments
- Familiarity with distributed systems, telemetry platforms, or backend architectures supporting high-frequency frontend applications
