Career paths at str

In this role, you’ll build the algorithms and systems that turn classified data—overhead imagery, communications, intelligence reports, sensor networks—into decision advantage. You’ll apply deep learning, computer vision, graph algorithms, reinforcement learning, and modern statistical methods to problems the commercial world does not see, on data the commercial world cannot access.

In this role, you’ll design the systems that turn a collection of platforms into a coordinated force. Your work—distributed mission planning, multi-agent task allocation, swarm coordination, kill-chain orchestration, contested-environment C2—spans teams of systems acting together, not single platforms acting alone. You’ll help build collaborative intelligence.

You’ll turn autonomy research into code that runs on real platforms. A planner that works in simulation is a paper; a planner that closes the loop under operational timing constraints is a capability. You’ll build the real-time control software, the C2 integration, and the simulation-to-reality path that gets an algorithm from a researcher’s laptop into the field.

Some targets can’t be studied directly—the hardware is scarce, unreachable, or classified, and is often coupled with its environment. You’ll give reverse engineers and vulnerability researchers high-fidelity models and emulations they can probe and instrument, so the team can work at a scale and pace that the real hardware would never allow.

In this role, you’ll build the pipelines that move robust software into the field quickly. You’ll automate build, test, security, and deployment so new capability reaches operators in days rather than months, with security built in from the start instead of bolted on at the end. This is software engineering practiced at velocity: the faster the mission needs to move, the more your pipeline matters.

You’ll develop approaches to make guarantees about code—proving that a program, or a patch to it, actually has the properties it claims. As AI systems learn to find and exploit vulnerabilities faster than people can analyze and patch them, the bottleneck is shifting to trust: can we be sure a fix is correct, and correct quickly enough to matter? You’ll build lightweight formal methods to answer that question at speed.

In this role, you’ll design the FPGAs, ASICs, mixed-signal boards, and RF front ends that form the hardware foundation for classified mission systems. Whether you’re building a high-performance beamformer, laying out a sensor receiver, or architecting an embedded real-time OS, your work moves from theory and simulation to lab validation to mission deployment. You make the algorithms real in hardware that must perform under pressure.

STR’s hardest problems don’t end when the algorithm works on the bench; they end when the integrated system holds up in a lab, on a range, under water or in the air. Integration and test engineers own that transition. You build the automated test frameworks, hardware-in-the-loop rigs, and field-trial campaigns that decide whether a capability is ready.

You’ll connect operational problems to engineered, fielded capability. You’ll move fluidly between analysis, software development, integration, and operations to turn promising technology into operational applications supporting a mission at the moment it’s needed.

In this role, you’ll treat the system itself as the artifact. You’ll build and own the model-based representation of a mission system—requirements, architecture, interfaces, and behavior captured in a live digital model rather than scattered across documents. Practiced with the rigor of software engineering, that model is what keeps hardware, algorithms, and software converging on one coherent design.

Product managers decide what gets built. In a company whose work starts as research, that means holding the line between what is technically possible and what the mission actually needs; shaping capability direction, sequencing what ships first, and staying close enough to operators that the answer is grounded in their problem rather than an assumption about it. This is a rapidly growing function, closer to the engineering than to marketing.

Program managers run classified and unclassified programs, holding the line on cost and schedule while staying close enough to the engineering to understand the implications of hard technical choices. Successful program managers either come from engineering or have built enough technical fluency to lead engineers credibly and make sound decisions under pressure.

You’ll figure out the intricacies of how undocumented software, firmware, and hardware targets work and build the tooling to do that work at scale. You’ll disassemble binaries, analyze instruction sets, recover protocols and state machines, and build AI-based automation that surfaces patterns no analyst could reliably spot by hand. You’ll turn opaque systems into understood ones, in tightly cleared environments against real targets.

In this role, you’ll design the algorithms that deliver overmatch in an increasingly contested spectrum. Your work—adaptive beamforming, multi-emitter localization, waveform design, RF threat emulation—moves from breakthrough idea to mathematical model to prototype to fielded hardware. You’ll help turn theory into deployed capability.

In this role, you’ll take algorithms from the research bench to the field. You’ll build the real-time signal-acquisition pipelines, embedded systems, and production software that turn radar or EO/IR data into information an operator can use. You work at the boundary between the algorithm researchers handing you prototypes and the customers who deploy your code. Your work is integration: signal processing chains, FPGA interfaces, hardware-coupled software, and the hardening required to move from lab to field.

In this role, you’ll work on some of the hardest physics and signal processing problems in the military space domain. You’ll build the payload algorithms, on-orbit processing, and ground-segment software that turn a satellite into a mission asset rather than just a bus. That includes space-based RF sensing, radiation- and power-constrained processing, real-time ground integration, and the satellite-to-ground links that carry mission intelligence home.

In this role, you’ll design the sonar systems, acoustic processing algorithms, and undersea sensor platforms that give operators a decisive advantage in contested waters. Your work, from beamforming and transducer arrays to seabed node deployments, bridges signal processing and hardware-coupled software. You’ll turn underwater physics into operational capability and test it where it matters—at sea.

In this role, you’ll hunt for the flaws that matter in software, firmware, and hardware—then prove them. You’ll take understood targets and probe them for weaknesses, develop proofs of concept and exploit chains, and reason about how a real adversary would chain small defects into mission impact. You’ll work at the intersection of offense and defense, in tightly cleared environments against real targets.