Senior Software Engineer, Core Systems
Senior engineer on Scout AI's core systems team building Fury, a robotic foundation model for defense. Day to day spans onboard C++ core libraries, cloud/GPU infrastructure for ML training, and simulation/eval tooling, with heavy focus on refactoring and hardening a fast-scaling codebase.
- Compensation
- $170K–$380K / yr
- Location
- Sunnyvale, California
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Proficient in C++ or Python for core systems, simulation, evaluation, and tooling work
- Demonstrated experience navigating, auditing, and refactoring large codebases
- Track record of building shared software frameworks or underlying libraries
- Ability to write, debug, and explain complex code independently without relying on AI tools
- Must be a U.S. Person due to required access to U.S. export controlled information or facilities
- Passion about defense of the United States and its allies
- May be expected to obtain and hold a U.S. Top Secret security clearance
Nice to have
- Cloud and infrastructure experience (GPU job scheduling, service deployment)
- Simulation or evals background
- Calibration or 3D reconstruction experience
- Edge or embedded hardware familiarity
Full description
The future of defense will be decided by those who field intelligent machines at scale. At Scout AI, we’re developing Fury, the first robotic foundation model for defense, to give U.S. forces overwhelming, adaptable, and autonomous power across every domain. Fury enables human operators to command fleets of robots through natural language, and empowers those machines to sense, decide, and act together as one. This mission will ask everything of us: urgency, precision, and relentless work.
**The Role
We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer who treats the code itself as the product. You’ll join the core software team at Scout AI and work across the systems Fury runs on: the onboard C++ code and core libraries, the cloud infrastructure that trains and evaluates the model, and the simulation and evals framework that tells us whether any of it works.
A lot of this job is hardening. As our platform rapidly scales, our senior engineers actively drive architectural stewardship - continually refining abstractions, hardening core systems, and evolving our software foundation to support our accelerated growth. We want someone who can take that on: read a large codebase, understand it, spot the anti-patterns, and restructure it well.
The same person should be comfortable building the test and validation systems that let the rest of the team move faster. We aren’t hiring for one narrow specialty. Depending on where you’re strongest, you might spend most of your time onboard C++, in GPU job infrastructure and cloud services, or in simulation and evaluation tooling. What’s common across all of it is a background building frameworks and libraries that other systems depend on, rather than applications on top of someone else’s framework. We use AI coding tools and expect you to as well, but we think of them as a multiplier on skills you already have. You should be able to write, explain, and debug your own code without them.
We’re a startup. You’ll be moving fast, context-switching daily, and helping define the culture and process as we go. This is a rare opportunity to come in early and architect the future of defense.
Responsibilities
- Develop and maintain onboard C++ software and core system libraries
- Build scalable, low-latency C++ and Python infrastructure for ML workloads
- Design cloud systems for data storage and GPU job scheduling
- Build simulation and evaluation pipelines, including synthetic agents, rendering tools, and scenario suites
- Create evaluation criteria and internal tooling to analyze and compare software release builds
- Refactor existing codebases to eliminate anti-patterns and improve system architecture