Robotics Software Engineer

Skana Robotics is a defense-tech startup building the future of the maritime domain through autonomous systems and fleet-level software. We operate at the fascinating junction of AI, robotics, and the sea. We build both hardware and software, featuring an amazing team and a hangar full of autonomous vessels.

We’re looking for a Robotics Software Engineer to design, build, and maintain core components of our robot software stack. You’ll work across the perception, planning, and controls pipeline, integrate with hardware and sensors, and help take features from prototype to production deployment.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You’ll write production code, debug on real hardware, and collaborate closely with the mechanical, electrical, and product teams.

What You’ll Do:

• Design and implement software components across the robotics stack — perception, state estimation, motion planning, navigation, and control.
• Integrate and interface with sensors (cameras, IMU, encoders, etc.) and actuators.
• Build and improve the robustness of autonomy features so they hold up in real-world conditions, not just simulation.
• Develop tooling for simulation, testing, logging, and data replay to speed up iteration and debugging.
• Diagnose issues on physical hardware — from timing and latency problems to sensor calibration and edge-case failures.
• Write clean, well-tested, maintainable code, and participate in design and code reviews.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (mechanical, electrical, product) to define requirements and ship features to deployment.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• 3–5 years of professional software engineering experience, with meaningful time spent on robotics.
• Strong proficiency in C++ and Python.
• Hands-on experience with ROS or ROS 2.
• Solid grasp of core robotics concepts: coordinate frames and transforms, kinematics, sensor fusion, and at least one of perception, motion planning, or control.
• Comfort working with real hardware — debugging on-device, reading logs, reasoning about timing and real-time constraints.
• Strong problem-solving instincts and the ability to own a problem end to end.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with a robotics simulator (Gazebo, Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, or similar).
• Background in one or more of: SLAM, state estimation (EKF/UKF), path planning, or trajectory optimization.
• Experience with real-time or embedded systems (RTOS, microcontrollers, low-latency control loops).
• Exposure to computer vision or ML for perception (OpenCV, PyTorch, point cloud processing).
• Experience taking a robotics product from prototype to field deployment.
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and deploying software to fleet hardware.