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Swarm Aero is building large autonomous swarming UAS (unmanned aircraft systems) for operations at scale in contested environments. The company is redefining air power with the largest swarming UAV and the most versatile swarming aircraft network in the world, moving quickly to launch the first aircraft designed specifically for swarming and Command & Control software to mobilize swarms of thousands of heterogeneous autonomous assets.
As Systems Safety Engineer, you will lead aircraft and system safety analysis (SSA), functional hazard assessment (FHA), fault tree analysis (FTA), common cause analysis (CCA), and common mode analysis (CMA). You will derive safety requirements and work with subsystem teams to develop appropriate architectural mitigations, failure containment, redundancy, and detection across avionics, flight control, propulsion, and power systems. You will define and justify development assurance level (DAL) allocations to mitigate software design errors.
You will support design reviews, test readiness reviews, and flight readiness reviews with safety inputs and findings. You will collaborate with systems engineering on architecture decisions with safety implications, including automatic takeoff/landing, airborne detect and avoid (DAA), and signal loss behaviors for navigation and communications. You will develop safety-related inputs to flight authorization packages and coordinate with airworthiness stakeholders as needed. You will lead root-cause identification and corrective action planning on safety-related issues discovered during analysis, simulation, integration, or test.
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. Safety is a design input, not a checkbox.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 7+ years of system safety experience on aerospace, defense, or UAS programs
- Strong foundation in systems engineering principles and practices
- Hands-on experience with SSA, FHA, FTA on flight-critical systems
- Strong understanding of failure mode classification, development assurance levels (DALs), and safety architecture principles
- Experience applying safety objectives to software development
- Experience with ARP4761 and ARP4754
- Experience with military safety standards and handbooks (e.g., MIL-STD-882, JSSSEH)
- Experience with civil software development standards (e.g., DO-178, DO-254)
- Ability to communicate safety findings clearly to engineering, test, and program leadership
- US person status required (ITAR: must be US citizen, lawful permanent resident, or eligible to obtain required authorizations from US Department of State)
NICE TO HAVE:
- Familiarity with System-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes (STAMP) and System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA)
- Experience analyzing degraded-mode behaviors and safety implications of signal loss or adversarial conditions
- Active security clearance
