Principal Engineer

About the Role

Swarm Aero is redefining air power by building the largest swarming UAV network in the world. We are rapidly launching aircraft designed specifically for swarming and developing Command & Control software to mobilize thousands of heterogeneous autonomous assets.

The Mission

We seek a Principal Engineer, Real-Time Visualization to own the interface controlling our drone swarm platform (Legion). Unlike typical dashboard roles, you will architect real-time visualization systems for high-stakes scenarios involving:

• Large-scale vehicle counts and heterogeneous assets
• Missions over intermittent or degraded comms links
• Dense telemetry, sensor data, scheduling, crew resources, and data link management

Your Responsibilities

• Architecture: Own the frontend architecture for our Command & Control (C2) system to support scale.
• Innovation: Evolve collaborative interfaces that function when communication degrades or drops entirely, with no prior industry playbook available.
• User Collaboration: Work directly with operators running Legion today to close the loop from mission feedback into UI improvements.
• Leadership: Set frontend patterns and standards for a small team shaping human-swarm interaction at scale.

What You Will Do

You will ship early and often, backed by strong CI/CD, QA, and DevSecOps practices. This role is about defining the future of command systems rather than maintaining legacy code.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• +8 years building complex, production frontend applications with a track record owning architecture.
• Deep experience with React or comparable modern frameworks.
• Mentoring engineers and setting technical direction for teams.

Differentiators

We look for experience in:

• Immediate mode (games/simulation) vs. retained mode UI paradigms.
• Performance-sensitive application development.
• Familiarity with video streaming protocols and geospatial applications.
• WebGL/OpenGL expertise.