Sensor Operator Jobs in Austin, TX (NOW HIRING)

Job Summary:
Saronic Technologies is a leader in revolutionizing autonomy at sea, dedicated to developing state-of-the-art solutions that enhance maritime operations through autonomous and intelligent platforms. The Systems Software Test Engineer will own and drive the testing strategy for the software stack on Saronic vessels, ensuring mission reliability by implementing various testing approaches and collaborating with cross-functional teams.
Responsibilities:
• Own and drive the test initiatives for Saronic's system software, including the HITL test catalog and station orchestrator, HITL-VM bridge framework, NixOS-based VM integration test suite.
• Design and roll out a unified test strategy that combines our primary tools: Rust unit and property tests, VM-based integration tests, HITL-based tests, and replay/simulation based scenario tests into a single decision tree so that the right test type covers the right risk class at the right cost.
• Build out property-based and deterministic simulation testing across the software stack. Expand coverage to the libraries where invariants matter most (planners, trackers, schedulers, state machines, codecs, IPC framing, certificate/identity stacks) and introduce a shared invariant-testing pattern that other engineers can adopt.
• Stand up fuzz testing infrastructure from scratch. Identify high leverage surfaces, write the harnesses, get them running continuously, and triage or resolve findings.
• Expand the HITL test catalog. Drive coverage into areas currently underserved, expanding VM based integration tests to exercise real hardware paths.
• Treat HITL stations as a first class product. Partner to keep stations healthy, observable, and reproducible; harden the CI scheduler pipeline that owns reservations and execution across multiple physical stations; reduce flake; improve the test result dashboard and analytics that engineers rely on.
• Inject faults, not just inputs. Build out chaos and fault injection capabilities, process kills, network partitions, time skew, CAN bus jamming, sensor dropouts that complement our existing test types and that property tests and HITL tests can both consume.
• Build interfaces between our onboard test infrastructure and our cloud infrastructure test artifact storage, MCAP capture and replay, metrics collection and storage, fleet-data fetch, and the existing CI plumbing so that an engineer can author one test and run it locally, in CI, on a HITL station, or against historical fleet data with minimal friction.
• Work hands-on with engineers across the company to catch real bugs. Pair with feature owners on test plans during design reviews, write the hard tests yourself, and travel to test sites to see your tests in action on real boats when needed.
• Document everything. Maintain the test infrastructure architecture docs, runbooks so that other engineers can keep adding good tests without needing your hands on the keyboard.
• Design, develop, and maintain software systems, using NixOS, for autonomous navigation, control, and communication of surface vessels.
• Collaborate with hardware engineers to integrate software with vessel systems, ensuring seamless operation.
• Implement algorithms for controls and sensor fusion.
• Optimize network communications for low bandwidth/high latency environments.
• Conduct software testing and validation to ensure reliability and performance in real-world maritime environments.
• Participate in code reviews and maintain high coding standards, ensuring scalability and maintainability of software.
• Troubleshoot and debug complex software issues, providing timely resolutions.
• Document software designs, processes, and test results for compliance and knowledge sharing.
• Stay updated on industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices in autonomous systems.
Qualifications:
Required:
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with substantial time spent owning test infrastructure, V&V strategy, or reliability for a non-trivial production system (robotics, autonomous vehicles, distributed systems, embedded, networking, or similar).
• 8+ years of equivalent experience, including architecture and cross-functional leadership of a verification or platform reliability function.
• Strong programming skills in Rust and/or C++, plus comfort with Python for test orchestration, data analysis, and CI tooling.
• Hands-on experience building and operating one or more of: hardware-in-the-loop test rigs, fuzz harnesses, property-based test suites, deterministic-simulation frameworks, or large-scale simulation/replay pipelines.
• Track record of treating test infrastructure as a real codebase.
• Strong systems intuition: you can read an unfamiliar daemon, find the invariants it actually depends on, and write tests that fail before the bug is fixed.
• Excellent debugging and root-cause analysis skills, with a passion for both 'firefighting' and 'fire prevention'.
• Comfort working in a fast-paced startup environment where the test strategy needs to be designed and shipped, not just discussed.
Preferred:
• Direct experience in deterministic simulation testing.
• Experience with fuzz testing.
• Experience with proptest, quickcheck, or other property-based testing crates.
• Experience with NixOS tests, Nix flakes, and Cargo↔Nix integration.
• Familiarity with robotics middleware and IPC patterns (ROS/ROS2, Zenoh, Redis pub/sub, MCAP).
• Familiarity with embedded Linux, low-level serial protocols (RS-232, CAN, SPI, I²C), and networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, UDP, QUIC, VPNs/overlays, PTP/PPS).
• Experience operating CI at scale (e.g., Buildkite, GitHub Actions).
• Experience with sensor fusion, controls, path-planning, or perception evaluation.
• Familiarity with maritime, aerospace, or other safety-critical operations; knowledge of DoD standards and regulations relating to software development is advantageous.
• A bias toward writing the tooling that lets engineers find their own bugs, rather than being the gatekeeper.
Company:
Saronic is building cutting-edge unmanned surface vehicles that enable maritime security and domain awareness by combining best-in-class hardware, software and artificial intelligence into one scalable, fully integrated platform. Founded in 2022, the company is headquartered in Austin, USA, with a team of 1001-5000 employees. The company is currently Late Stage.