Build the software behind Hadrian, Praetorian's AI-enhanced command and control system coordinating autonomous defence against drone swarms.

The Threat

Somewhere over Eastern Europe or the Red Sea, right now, a cluster of cheap, autonomous drones is doing something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago: coordinating as a swarm, adapting in real time, and closing in on a target faster than any human operator can track by eye. That's not a hypothetical — it's the shape of modern warfare, and most defence systems still weren't built for it.

About Praetorian

Praetorian Aeronautics was founded in 2022 to build advanced autonomous aerial systems that can keep pace with that threat. Headquartered in Adelaide, with teams now in Melbourne, Darwin (and more...) we're building an integrated family of counter-autonomy systems — Arrow, Dagger, Hadrian and Venator — that let defence operators see a swarm coming, understand it, and stop it, even while everything around them is jammed, spoofed or GPS-denied.

Hadrian is the command layer that ties Praetorian's systems together: it takes the chaos of a coordinated drone attack and turns it into a decision an operator can act on in seconds, then deploys interceptors to make that decision real.

As Lead Software Engineer, you're joining while Hadrian's core services are still being written. There's no decade of legacy architecture to work around, no ten layers of process between a good idea and production. The calls you make about how these services are structured, how the team writes Rust, how reliability gets tested — that's not a proposal that goes into a review queue. It's the standard, because right now, you're the one setting it.

What You'll Do

You'll take technical ownership of the core Rust services behind swarm analysis, mission coordination and operational decision-making, working directly with the researchers turning cutting-edge reinforcement learning into software that has to work in the field. You'll set the architecture, help raise the engineering bar across the team, mentor and guide the engineers building alongside you, and drive the testing and optimisation practices that keep this software reliable when it's deployed in operationally relevant environments — not just running clean in a demo.

What We're Looking For

We need someone who's led this kind of build before — with proven experience setting technical direction on complex, high-performance system-level software, deep programming skill in Rust, C++ or something close to it, and the judgement to make hard architectural calls under real ambiguity, on complex or distributed systems, without someone senior to check with first.

A degree in Software Engineering, Computer Science or equivalent experience gets you in the door; time with embedded or cross-platform Linux, autonomous systems or robotics, reinforcement learning, or immediate-mode UI work would all be an asset, though none of them are the whole story — the whole story is whether you're ready to own something from the ground up.

Why Join Us

• Real equity through our ESOP
• A seat on one of the most technically serious problems in defence right now
• A small, highly technical team where your decisions carry weight from day one
• Genuine ownership and influence as Praetorian scales
• Professional development and learning opportunities

Interested in leading the software behind Australia's answer to drone swarm warfare? Reach out to careers@praetorian-aeronautics.com or hit Apply.