Senior Robotics Engineer

About Paladin Drones:
Paladin is revolutionizing public safety with autonomous drone technology. Our mission? To be on the frontline of emergencies within 90 seconds. When someone dials 911, our drones take flight, providing first responders with a real-time overhead view of the situation, amplifying their situational awareness and hastening response times. Leveraging LTE for unlimited range and control, our drones currently answer the call of duty over 1000 times weekly across multiple cities and states. 

Our vision is ambitious: within the next decade, our technology will be an essential tool for first responders in every city worldwide. As a tight-knit, passionate, and forward-thinking team, we are committed to pushing the boundaries of UAV tech and making a monumental difference in a rapidly advancing domain.

Position Overview:We’re hiring a Senior Robotics Software Engineer to join our growing autonomy team. This role is for an experienced engineer who can independently design and build production-grade robotics systems, and who thrives in an environment where deep technical thinking and real-world execution go hand-in-hand.

You’ll be expected to own key modules in our autonomy stack, solve challenging problems across perception, planning, and systems integration, and be a resource others turn to for technical clarity and mentorship.

Key Responsibilities

• Autonomy & Controls: Design, implement, and maintain modular, real-time autonomy software powering our UAV platforms, with a focus on navigation, localization, guidance, and flight control in GPS-denied and dynamic environments.
• Perception & Mapping: Lead development of systems for localization, SLAM, tracking/following, obstacle avoidance, and spatial awareness, leveraging sensor fusion, computer vision, and semantic understanding.
• System Architecture: Contribute to architectural design, long-term planning, and technical decision-making across the autonomy stack to ensure robustness, scalability, and maintainability.
• Integration & Testing: Deploy, debug, and validate robotic systems on physical drone hardware in both lab and field settings, building tools and frameworks to improve simulation, testing, and deployment.
• Innovation: Stay ahead of robotics and autonomy research, proposing and prototyping advanced features that translate into operational advantages.
• Collaboration: Work closely with cross-functional teams (embedded, cloud, operations, and product) to ensure seamless system performance and delivery.
• Mentorship & Leadership: Own critical software components and services, ensuring high reliability and performance. Support other team members through technical mentorship, design validation, and deep debugging, fostering growth and excellence within the robotics team.
• Code Quality: Write clean, maintainable, and testable code, and participate in rigorous peer reviews to uphold high engineering standards

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical/Mechanical Engineering, or a related field.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience in robotics or autonomous systems software.
• Proficiency in C++ and/or Python with a strong grasp of multithreaded and distributed systems.
• Experience building and scaling multi-service architectures (e.g., using ZMQ, custom IPC, etc.).
• Solid understanding of SLAM, localization, and perception-driven autonomy.
• Proven track record of taking systems from prototype → production → scaled deployment.
• Strong debugging skills and a self-sufficient problem-