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Swarm Aero is building the world's largest swarming UAV network and Command & Control software to coordinate thousands of heterogeneous autonomous aircraft. The company is led by aerospace veterans from Scaled Composites, Airbus, Archer Aviation, Blue Origin, and Boom Supersonic, with a track record of designing 30+ novel aircraft and negotiating multi-billion-dollar defense contracts.
As a Backend Software Engineer, you will architect and build the core systems powering Legion's Command & Control platform—infrastructure that enables a single operator to plan, direct, and execute missions across networked swarms of aircraft in real time, even over intermittent communications. This is not typical CRUD work; it requires expertise in real-time distributed systems, high-throughput telemetry pipelines, and novel problem spaces with minimal prior art.
Key responsibilities include:
- Architecting backend systems for a C2 platform directing heterogeneous aircraft swarms
- Building distributed, collaborative real-time infrastructure for controlling large numbers of aircraft simultaneously, with graceful degradation under comms loss
- Designing and building services that ingest, process, and distribute dense vehicle telemetry, sensor data, scheduling, crew resources, and data link management
- Owning backend features end to end, from design through deployment
- Shipping early and often with strong CI/CD, QA, and DevSecOps practices
You should have 6+ years building complex backend systems with deep distributed systems expertise, strong instincts for reliability and performance at scale, and production experience operating backend services and APIs. Ideal candidates have experience with real-time and event-driven systems, performance-sensitive high-throughput applications, messaging and streaming protocols, systems operating under degraded connectivity, and geospatial data applications.
This role offers meaningful equity in a high-growth defense technology company, competitive base salary, comprehensive benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401k, PTO, paid sick leave, monthly wellness stipend, paid parental leave), and the opportunity to shape how humans command autonomous systems at scale. ITAR compliance required: applicant must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, or eligible to obtain required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.
