Senior Cloud Application Engineer Swarm Systems

Description

Apium Swarm Robotics (ASR) is revolutionizing swarm autonomy software for air, surface, undersea, and ground vehicles operating across dual-use commercial and defense environments. Our systems are deployed on real platforms, tested in the field, and delivered to customers operating in complex, uncertain, and safety-critical conditions.

We do not build research prototypes or slideware. Our software is integrated into real vehicles, tested in the field, and delivered to customers who depend on operational reliability, speed of execution, and mission relevance. We prioritize performance over hype.

ASR systems represent the next phase in autonomy: collaborative swarming. These are not like pre-programmed drones for light shows. We are creating real-time cooperative management that lets one operator control dozens to hundreds of vehicles in real-time with the ease of controlling a single vehicle. As such, this role requires comfort with responsibility, ambiguity, and operational accountability.

ASR seeks a Senior Cloud Application Engineer to design, build, and operate the cloud-based applications and services that run ASR’s swarm simulation, delivery, and integration platform. This is a deeply technical individual contributor role centered on AWS, responsible for taking the Apium Swarm Simulator to the cloud and turning it into a multi-tenant service used for training, software validation, sales operations, and customer modeling of their planned operational environments. The focus is on the applications and services that run on the cloud, rather than on building the underlying platform primitives from scratch.

A central part of the role is connecting the cloud environment to ASR’s CI/CD pipeline so that the latest software artifacts are automatically available and selectable in the simulator. Users should be able to run against a rolling latest build or pin to a specific release that models the software on their current physical assets. You will build the simulator service to run within a multi-tenant, firewalled model that keeps each customer and partner isolated from one another’s data, partnering with platform and security colleagues on the underlying isolation boundaries, and you will design the customizable, permissioned access to logs that partners need for their own development.

This is also a customer and partner-facing role. You will work directly with partners to help them integrate against ASR’s virtual API for test integration, and you will translate their needs into secure, well-scoped access to the simulation environment. A further core responsibility is using the cloud to run large-scale, stochastic simulation as an automated release gate: executing the simulator many times over in time-accelerated runs to gather statistically meaningful test data and benchmark a candidate build before it is published and before mission engineers take it to the field. The initial environment is AWS commercial. As ASR’s government and defense business grows, there is an opportunity to grow into hardened and regulated environments (such as AWS GovCloud and the associated compliance regimes) over time, but that is not a day-one requirement of the role.

This role is based on-site at ASR’s San Diego, California facility. The right candidate is fluent across the AWS compute spectrum, has strong opinions grounded in real trade-offs about when to reach for virtual machines, managed containers, or serverless, and treats security and cost as first-class design constraints rather than afterthoughts.

This is a senior, foundational hire. As the first dedicated owner of ASR’s cloud application layer, you will set technical direction and standards for how ASR builds and ships cloud software, and you will have a clear path to grow into broader ownership of the domain, including technical leadership and, over time, building and leading a team as the cloud footprint expands. We are hiring for someone who can do the work now and grow into leading it.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate the cloud infrastructure that runs the Apium Swarm Simulator for training, software validation, sales operations, and customer environment modeling

Integrate the cloud environment with ASR’s CI/CD pipeline so the latest software artifacts are automatically available and selectable in the simulator, supporting both rolling latest builds and pinned specific releases

Build and deploy the simulator and related services across AWS compute (EC2, ECS, EKS, Fargate, ECR) within a multi-tenant, firewalled model, partnering with platform and security colleagues on the underlying isolation boundaries so that customers and partners cannot access one another’s data

Integrate application authentication and authorization using AWS-native services (such as Amazon Cognito and IAM), following least-privilege best practices

Design customizable, permissioned access to logs and telemetry to support partner development at varying levels of visibility

Work directly with partners to help them integrate against ASR’s virtual API for test integration, serving as a technical point of contact

Select appropriate cloud deployment strategies (virtual machines, managed and scaled containers, or serverless) based on performance, cost, and operational trade-offs

Contribute to infrastructure-as-code, observability, and cost management for the services you build, and help establish operational runbooks and incident response in partnership with platform colleagues

Establish and uphold cloud engineering standards, including secure CI/CD, automated testing, and repeatable, auditable deployments

Serve as the directly responsible individual for the cloud application domain, setting technical direction, architectural standards, and best practices that other engineers adopt

Mentor engineers and provide technical guidance on cloud application design, and help scale the team’s cloud capability as ASR grows

Build cloud-based benchmark and regression testing that runs stochastic, time-accelerated simulations at scale (1 to N runs) to gather statistically meaningful performance and reliability data on each candidate build

Integrate large-scale simulation benchmarks into the release process as an automated quality gate, so that a build must clear defined benchmark thresholds before it is published or handed to mission engineers for field testing

Orchestrate parallel and distributed simulation workloads efficiently across cloud compute, managing scale, cost, and run time (for example through batch, spot, or autoscaling strategies)

Aggregate, store, and report simulation results, including pass/fail criteria, statistical summaries, and trend analysis across releases

Required Qualifications

Must be a US Citizen

7+ years of professional cloud application, cloud engineering, or platform engineering experience, primarily on AWS, including a track record of owning significant systems end to end

Hands-on expertise across the AWS compute spectrum, including EC2, ECS, EKS, Fargate, and ECR

Demonstrated experience building and deploying applications that run within multi-tenant or isolated environments, keeping tenant data separated

Experience implementing authentication and authorization using AWS-native services such as Amazon Cognito and IAM, following least-privilege best practices

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