About the role
We are looking for a Robotics Systems Engineer with 4+ years of experience to help scale Quartermaster's SmartMast platform — a multimodal edge sensing system collecting maritime intelligence that no one else in the world is capturing at scale. You'll be joining a ~75-person defense tech startup doing something genuinely novel: building a distributed sensor constellation across the world's oceans using AI, robotics, and satellite connectivity.
This is a high-ownership role where you'll take complex, ambiguous problems end-to-end with limited hand-holding. The team is lean, the mission is real, and the work is visible. If you thrive in fast-moving environments, care deeply about what you're building, and have a track record of shipping production-grade systems at scale — not just in the lab — this is the role for you.
What you'll be working on:
- Own the stability and scalability of the SmartMast middleware stack — aggressively paying down tech debt through targeted rewrites while preserving API compatibility with already-fielded units operating in the field today.
- Build and maintain ROS2-based middleware utilities that orchestrate multimodal sensors (cameras, radar, IMU, GPS, SDR, acoustic) on Jetson-based edge hardware in harsh maritime environments.
- Solve real constraint problems: optimize bandwidth-limited data transmission over Starlink, implement compression strategies, and contribute to artifact delivery pipelines that feed downstream AWS-based data products.
- Write tests that matter — develop diagnostics tooling and testing frameworks for unattended, long-duration deployments where failure isn't caught until a vessel comes back online. Participate in on-call rotation to support fielded systems.
- Work at the seams — collaborate with AI and backend teams to define data formats, observability frameworks, and platform abstractions that other delivery teams depend on. You're building the foundation, not just a feature.