Robotics Software Engineer (Autonomy)

We're looking for a Robotics Software Engineer to help advance our autonomous maritime systems. Our autonomy stack is already deployed and operating in real-world environments—you'll help extend its capabilities, improve performance in increasingly challenging conditions, and scale collaborative autonomy from small coordinated teams to large, multi-domain autonomous operations.

What It's Like to Work Here

We're a fast-paced engineering team that believes the best products are built by testing early, iterating often, and shipping quickly. Engineers have a high degree of ownership and work across the entire product lifecycle—from idea to deployment.

Field testing is a core part of how we build. We prefer to be on the water daily, validating new features, observing operators, and seeing our systems perform in real-world conditions. That direct connection between engineering and field operations helps us make better design decisions, move faster, and build products that solve real problems.

What You'll Work On

• Improve and extend our existing autonomy stack for unmanned maritime systems.
• Advance autonomous navigation in increasingly dynamic and congested waterways.
• Improve path planning, decision making, and obstacle avoidance in complex real-world environments.
• Help scale collaborative autonomy from today's small coordinated teams to large, heterogeneous fleets operating across maritime and multi-domain platforms.
• Develop autonomy that enables operators to confidently manage increasingly capable autonomous teams.
• Integrate heterogeneous sensor data to improve localization, perception, and autonomous decision-making.
• Optimize autonomy software for reliable, low-latency execution on edge compute platforms.
• Build robust deployment infrastructure for vehicles operating continuously in the field.
• Collaborate closely with perception, controls, frontend, and hardware engineers to rapidly prototype, test, and deploy new capabilities.

Requirements

• Strong experience with robotics, autonomous systems, or motion planning.
• Experience implementing mathematical path planning algorithms (A*, Graph Search, RRT, Potential Fields, MPC, or similar).
• Strong software development skills in C++, Python, or similar languages.
• Experience developing on Linux-based embedded systems (Yocto experience is a plus).
• Experience integrating multiple sensors such as cameras, radar, LiDAR, GPS, and IMUs.
• Understanding of localization, perception, navigation, and autonomous decision-making.
• Experience deploying and optimizing software on edge compute platforms.
• Familiarity with Git, CI/CD, and modern software engineering practices.

Nice to Have

• Experience with ROS2, NVIDIA Jetson, NVIDIA Holoscan, CUDA, or GPU-accelerated computing.
• Experience developing autonomy for USVs, UGVs, UAVs, or other robotic platforms.
• Experience with collaborative autonomy, multi-agent systems, or swarm robotics.
• Experience operating autonomous systems in real-world environments.
• Experience with distributed software deployment and embedded testing frameworks.

About the company

Splash is developing the next generation of autonomous surface vessels (ASVs) to provide National Security and defend critical assets such as oil rigs and shipping terminals. Our long-term vision is to make traditional naval vessels obsolete by creating a fleet of low-cost and versatile boats which will be able to dominate the seas. Our expertise in mass manufacturing, engineering and quickly scaling operations will make this vision a reality.