Swarm Aero is hiring Forward Deployed Engineers to field its Legion C2 software with U.S. military customers
The Oxnard defense startup posted Forward Deployed and Senior Forward Deployed Engineer roles on October 13 at $175K–$220K plus equity. FDEs embed with government and military customers, travel up to 60%, and own Legion command-and-control deployments in operational environments.
Swarm Aero, the Oxnard company building swarming UAVs and Legion command-and-control software, posted a Forward Deployed Software Engineer role on October 13, 2026, with a companion Senior Forward Deployed Engineer opening the same day. Base pay for the FDE seat is listed at $175K–$220K plus equity.
The job embeds engineers with U.S. government and military customers to make Legion C2 work in real operational contexts—domestic and international—not only in lab or staging environments. Day-to-day work spans building integrations across diverse hardware, debugging distributed systems from logs and network traffic, contributing to core services with field insight, and traveling up to 60% to test sites and customer locations. Candidates must be eligible for a U.S. Secret clearance; an active clearance is preferred.
For the FDE market, this is another defense-tech firm treating forward deployment as the path from autonomy software to warfighter use: high travel, clearance gates, and production ownership in austere settings. It sits alongside other recent national-security FDE openings and underscores how much of the role's growth is outside pure SaaS AI vendors.
Source: jobs.ashbyhq.com