Senior AI Systems Engineer – RoboticsSwarming (all genders)

About Us

STARK is a new kind of defence technology company revolutionizing the way autonomous systems are deployed across multiple domains. We design develop and manufacture high-performance unmanned systems that are software-defined mass-scalable and cost-effective. This provides our operators with a decisive edge in highly contested environments.

Were focused on delivering deployable high-performance systems - not future a time of rising threats STARK is bolstering the technological edge of NATO Allies and their Partners to deter aggression and defend Europe - today.

About the team

We move fast ship real software and operate under constraints most engineers never encounter low-bandwidth networks air-gapped devices high-stakes decision loops. There is no room for abstraction for its own sake. Everything we build ends up in the hands of real operators in the field.

Our Team is dedicated to a mission of pure strikes.

Your mission

As anSenior AI Systems Engineer with a focus on Robotics and Swarming you will play a critical role in defining the tactical brain and behavioral logic onboard next-generation autonomous drone swarms. Rather than focusing on computer vision you will work directly with advanced behavioral frameworks multi-agent reinforcement learning and high-fidelity simulation environments to build robust scalable decision-making functionality.

You will contribute as a highly skilled individual contributorhands-on with the systembridging the gap between machine learning models and physical flight controls ensuring swarms can dynamically reason and coordinate in real-time. Your work will be essential to ensuring that our autonomous systems operate reliably in real-world unpredictable environments.

Responsibilities

• Design train and deploy decision-making frameworks using RL imitation learning and behavior-tree architectures for coordinated behavior across our fixed-wing tube-launched and quadcopter platforms.
• Develop and optimize algorithms for decentralized task allocation collective intelligence and multi-vehicle strategic coordination under communication-constrained or GPS-denied conditions building on our existing TDOA/RSSI localization and mesh networking work.
• Build and heavily utilize ROS2 SITL environments to stress-test behavioral logic neural networks and reactive behaviors before hardware deployment extending our current simulation-phase epic (containerized comms leader-follower scaling).
• Engineer pipelines to move trained models and policies off the GPU cluster and onto edge robotics hardware without performance degradation feeding directly into our hardware-phase epic (mesh networking with real drones end-to-end flight test).
• Collaborate closely with the perception and flight control teams to ensure AI-driven behaviors interface cleanly with safety-critical C flight software.
• Profile and debug behavioral system performance under embedded constraints ensuring stability and robustness in field deployments across all three platform types.
• Contribute to system-level architecture discussions on autonomous decision-making heuristic planning and multi-agent reliability.

Qualifications

• Masters or Ph.D. in Robotics Computer Science Aerospace Engineering or related field with emphasis on autonomous decision-making.
• 3 years professional or advanced research experience in Robotics AI multi-agent reinforcement learning or autonomous behavioral modeling.
• Strong programming proficiency in Python and C for embedded and robotics development; comfort working alongside safety-critical flight code.
• Mastery of SITL workflows to validate neural networks and decision-making logic under variable adversarial or degraded-comms conditions.
• Deep theoretical and practical knowledge of MDPs game theory heuristics and trajectory/motion planning applicable to strike-capable UAV coordination.
• Proven track record moving ML models from simulation to physical edge-robotics systems ideally on multi-vehicle or swarm platforms rather than single-agent robotics.
• Strong debugging skills in real-time resource-constrained environments.
• Effective communicator able to work across autonomy hardware and flight-software disciplines.
• Willingness to travel occasionally for field testing and deployment.

For further information please reach via

About us

SECURITY CLEARANCE
Due to the nature of our work in the defence sector candidates must be eligible to obtain and maintain the appropriate security clearance required for this position. Details will be provided during the recruitment process.


EQUAL OPPORTUNITY
We are an equal-opportunity employer committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race colour religion sex national origin disability or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Required Experience:

Senior IC

Employment Type : Full-Time
Experience: years
Vacancy: 1