Autonomy Engineer, Navigation

About BRINC

At BRINC, we are redefining public safety with an innovative ecosystem of life-saving tools. Our journey started with the development of drones and ruggedized throw phones, designed to access unsafe areas and establish communication to de-escalate situations. Today, we've expanded into creating and deploying 911 response networks, where drones are dispatched to 911 calls to provide real-time visual data, enhancing safety and enabling de-escalation-focused responses. Our cutting-edge solutions are utilized by over 600 public safety agencies across America and the company has raised over $150M from investors, including Index Ventures, Motorola Solutions, Sam Altman, Dylan Field, Mike Volpe, Alexandr Wang and more. At BRINC, we are committed to recruiting the world's best talent to join us in our mission to support first responders in saving lives.

About This Role

We are seeking an Autonomy Engineer to join our team and advance the navigation capabilities of our UAVs and public safety products. You will design, implement, and optimize real-time planning & perception algorithms that enable safe navigation across a wide range of scenarios. In this role, you will work across local trajectory generation, obstacle detection and avoidance, global route planning, and behavior planning. You will collaborate closely with state estimation & control, embedded software, live ops, and hardware teams to bring next-generation navigation solutions into production UAV platforms.

Key Responsibilities

• Research and design algorithms enabling safe UAV navigation.
• Implement and optimize navigation algorithms on embedded processors for computational efficiency and system resiliency.
• Work with sensor data to detect and avoid obstacles and environmental hazards.
• Validate navigation performance through simulation, log replay, hardware-in-the-loop, and real-world flight testing in a variety of conditions.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure seamless integration.
• Contribute to technical strategy, define best practices, and help guide the evolution of the navigation and sensing stack as systems scale and mature.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science or a related field, or a Master's degree with a minimum of 2+ years of industry experience.
• Strong programming skills in C++ and Python, with experience developing software for real physical systems.
• Experience developing planning or perception systems for unmanned systems.

Preferred Skills

• Familiarity with motion/path planning techniques such as RRT*, A*, or MPC-based trajectory optimization.
• Experience applying radar, computer vision, or deep learning for perception on resource-constrained edge hardware.
• Background in UAV reliability, redundancy, and autonomous flight considerations.
• Experience with ROS2, PX4, MAVSDK, and/or similar robotics middleware.
• Familiarity with safety-critical or certifiable software practices a plus.