Software Engineer, Sentry Software (Ground Based Air Defense)

Title: Software Engineer, Sentry Software (Ground Based Air Defense) Location: Irvine, California, United States

About The Team

The Sentry Tower Software team develops robotic systems that provide force protection capabilities, monitoring the perimeter of secure areas, land or sea, for approaching people, vehicles, and vessels. We live in a world where security officers are increasingly overwhelmed by sensor data feeds. Our products leverage advanced sensor fusion and autonomy to seamlessly render activity in the environment to Lattice's common operating picture.

About the Job

Not every Sentry Tower does the same job. The same core platform that watches a perimeter for people and vehicles also underpins our ground-based air defense variants, where the tower's mission is detecting and tracking aircraft, and the sensor payload, the radar integration, and the configuration all shift accordingly. We're hiring a Software Engineer to develop and own the software for those variants, funded by and delivered to our Air Defense program. The threat they exist for is the cheap, fast, hard-to-see aircraft that has changed what defending a fixed site means. Detection has to happen with enough time left to do something about it, which puts the burden on how well the payload, the tracking, and the configuration actually work together on a real tower.

You will work in the same declarative NixOS platform the rest of the team builds on, owning your variants' slice of it: product configuration, radar and camera payload integration, networking, manufacturing test hooks, and the software update path. Some of this is new feature work driven by program requirements, and some of it is consolidation, because these variant configurations grew up separately from our modern platform base, and moving them onto it means understanding both well enough to prove nothing was lost in the move. This program delivers several products, a few of them tower variants, and those variants are what you'll work on. The result is that you end up knowing how they are put together better than anyone, which is genuinely useful to a team this size.

This is a good role for an engineer who wants breadth. You'll touch the radar and camera services, the network configuration, the build system, and the manufacturing and field tooling, with an experienced team around you owning each of those domains in depth. Travel is light, roughly 10% and mostly local, to test sites and the manufacturing floor rather than overseas.

The honest shape of the role: the scope is the program's tower variants rather than the whole product line, and the schedule comes substantially from the contract rather than from what you would pick next. Most days are integration work, configuration, and support rather than novel algorithms. What you get in exchange is unusual breadth and products you own end to end. If you want to go deep on one technical specialty, this is not that role.

Our Product:

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Own the software configuration for the Air Defense tower variants: product definitions, payload and sensor configuration, networking, and image builds in our declarative platform.
• Integrate and support the variants' sensor payloads, particularly radar and infrared camera services, including the configuration and behavior differences that separate them from our perimeter security products.
• Develop features driven by Air Defense program requirements, working from program needs through design, implementation, and delivery into a shipping product.
• Migrate the variants' legacy configuration onto our modern platform base, replacing product-specific one-offs with the common, composable modules the rest of the fleet uses.
• Own the variants' software update and deployment path, and the manufacturing test configuration that validates units as they're built.
• Support the product in the field and on the line: triage issues, reproduce and root-cause them, fix what's yours, and drive what isn't with the owning team.
• Work with the Air Defense program's engineers and stakeholders to keep requirements, schedule, and technical reality aligned.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 2+ years of professional software engineering building and shipping real systems.
• Proficiency in Rust or C++, with the ability to work across an existing codebase you didn't write.
• Solid Linux systems fundamentals: the command line, systemd, networking basics, and log-driven debugging.
• Practical experience integrating software with hardware, whether sensors, embedded devices, or instrumentation, and comfort working on a bench with real equipment.
• Demonstrated ability to own a piece of a larger system end to end, including the unglamorous parts: configuration, deployment, testing, and support.
• Clear written communication, since you'll be the interface between a program's requirements and the team's implementation.
• US person status required, with eligibility to obtain and maintain a US security clearance.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience with radar, RF systems, or air surveillance and tracking.
• Experience with camera or imaging pipelines, especially infrared.
• Experience with declarative configuration management or infrastructure-as-code. Nix or NixOS is what we use; adjacent tooling is a fine starting point.
• Python for tooling, scripting, and test automation.
• Robotics experience, or work with motion control and pointing systems.