Software Engineer — Fleet

About the role

Company Background Specter's mission is to help automate the physical world.

Today, we build video sensors with state-of-the-art AI agents that answer any question, anywhere in their environments. Our systems can automatically detect and reason about any physical activity captured on camera, from security incidents (e.g. perimeter intrusion, theft, LPR), to safety monitoring (e.g. PPE detection, injured people), to operational efficiency (e.g. material tracking, congestion monitoring). We offer both long range wireless (1km range) and wired sensor variants to suit any deployment.

Our co-founders Xerxes and Philip are passionate about empowering our partners in the fast approaching world of physical AI and robotics. We are a small, fast growing team who hail from Anduril, Tesla, Uber, and the U.S. Special Forces.

The Role

We are looking for a Software Engineer to lead the architecture and operation of our fleet management, deployment, and recovery systems. Every device we field operates over a long-range wireless link and must remain fully resilient without physical intervention—making fleet reliability a core distributed systems problem.

We are seeking a strong candidate with hands-on experience building software for physical devices and a clear engineering perspective. The core workflow centers on three main pillars: self-testing devices that continuously report status, reliable software deployment pipelines with verified delivery, and a unified control plane providing real-time operational visibility. In this position, you will be responsible for architecting and implementing these core systems end-to-end.

To support these capabilities, our tech stack spans Rust for systems, C on embedded hardware, NixOS for system images, Python for fleet services, and TypeScript for the control plane. We are looking for an engineer eager to work across all of these layers to ensure our control plane seamlessly reflects and manages device state in the field.

Responsibilities

Fleet Control Plane

- Architect and build the unified control plane providing real-time operational visibility across every device fielded over long-range wireless links.

- Own the underlying data model to reconcile claimed vs. actual device states and ensure seamless state representation across the entire tech stack (TypeScript, Python, NixOS, Rust, C).

- Design targeted execution pathways that enable real-time operational management at the device, site, or customer fleet level.

- Maintain control plane trustworthiness and convergence during partial failures or when significant portions of the fleet are offline or unreachable.

Updates & Rollouts

- Architect reliable deployment pipelines that handle over-the-air image and firmware updates with verified delivery over constrained wireless links.

- Implement staged rollout strategies and automatic rollback mechanisms to ensure fleet resilience against flawed updates.