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UFORCE is a defence-technology company founded in Ukraine and headquartered in London, building uncrewed vessels, ground robotics, aircraft, autonomy software, and command-and-control systems. The company operates across Europe, the United States, and Asia.
As Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Autonomy), you will design, build, and operate software capabilities that improve mission effectiveness and safety of uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs) across the UFORCE C2/C4ISR stack. This role spans perception autonomy, autonomous behaviours (collision avoidance, target-based manoeuvring, engagement), and swarm intelligence. You will own cross-system initiatives from design and implementation through scenario-based verification, field trials, deployment, and iteration.
Key responsibilities include:
- Build production-grade capabilities across perception, autonomous behaviours, collision avoidance (COLAV), and multi-USV coordination
- Define measurable acceptance criteria for autonomy performance, safety, reliability, and operator trust
- Validate perception and behaviours across day/night operations, different sea states, sensor degradation, and GNSS/RF-challenged conditions
- Develop swarm capabilities such as task allocation, role assignment, formation control, and distributed sensing
- Build scenario libraries, replay tooling, automated metrics, and CI gates to prevent regressions
- Introduce structured logging, playback, and failure classification to accelerate field diagnosis
- Build operator controls and safeguards enabling crews to use autonomy without continuous engineering support
- Collaborate with platform, C2, product, and field teams to define clear interfaces and deliver cross-system capabilities
Success means perception and COLAV meet agreed performance and safety criteria in representative trials; swarm capabilities are used routinely in multi-USV exercises and degrade safely under constraints; operators can configure and use autonomy without day-to-day engineering intervention; automated scenario testing prevents safety and reliability regressions; field failures can be reproduced and diagnosed within agreed timeframes; and capabilities have documented operating envelopes, limitations, and evidence of field readiness.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years of production software or backend engineering experience
- Strong experience with Java, Python, or .NET/C#
- Strong mathematical foundations relevant to autonomy and robotics
- Experience with distributed, real-time, event-driven, or mission-critical systems
- Understanding of sockets, UDP, latency, packet loss, and low-level protocols
- Strong testing, observability, debugging, and operational ownership
- Clear communication and cross-team collaboration skills
NICE TO HAVE:
- Experience with C++, Rust, or C
- Experience with robotics, autonomous vehicles, maritime autonomy, or UxV systems
- Knowledge of perception, sensor fusion, navigation, planning, or control systems
- Experience with COLAV, simulation, replay tooling, or multi-agent systems
- Experience in defence, C2/C4ISR, or constrained operating environments
