Vice President, Software

About Us

With more than 2 million nautical miles sailed and 50,000 days at sea, Saildrone has earned the trust of governments worldwide. Our unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) deliver continuous, real-time intelligence in the toughest oceans on Earth—giving our partners faster awareness, stronger security, and a decisive edge at sea.

Our USVs are long-range, extreme-endurance platforms powered by advanced sensors and proprietary AI - they have been designed to operate where no crewed vessel can. They collect critical insights above and below the surface to support border security, law enforcement, naval operations, and undersea infrastructure protection.

Headquartered in Alameda, CA, with offices in Washington, DC, and global deployment hubs, Saildrone operates missions worldwide. Join a fast-moving, mission-driven team at the intersection of AI, autonomy, and defense technology—where data turns into intelligence, and intelligence drives action.

Saildrone is seeking a Vice President of Software to lead the software organization powering our autonomous maritime platform. Reporting directly to the CEO, this is a senior role that partners closely with the CEO to define, evolve, and execute Saildrone’s software strategy in support of the company’s mission and business objectives.

You will own the execution and organizational leadership of the software ecosystem — from onboard autonomy and vehicle control to data pipelines, analytics, ML/ AI, cyber security and our customer-facing product and API eco system — while working with the CEO to align software priorities with company strategy.

This is a highly collaborative executive role for a strong leader who thrives at the intersection of vision, execution, and real-world operational systems in a national security and defense environment.

• Partner directly with the CEO to co-create Saildrone’s long-term software vision, strategy, and priorities.
• Provide clear, candid input on tradeoffs between speed, capability, reliability, risk, and scalability.
• Ensure software strategy remains tightly aligned with company objectives, customer needs, the in-house electro‑mechanical implementation and operational realities.

• Lead and scale a multidisciplinary software organization spanning autonomy, embedded systems, ML/AI, cloud, data infrastructure, and applications.
• Build and mentor a strong leadership bench across directors, managers, and senior technical leaders.
• Establish a culture of accountability, ownership, collaboration, and engineering excellence.
• Recruit, retain, and develop world‑class software talent in a highly competitive market.

• Own the end‑to‑end software lifecycle from system architecture through development, deployment, and sustained operations.
• Ensure on‑time delivery of secure, reliable, high‑performance software products, critical for operations of defense‑grade weaponized platforms.
• Drive adoption of modern engineering practices including automated testing, observability, and security‑by‑design.
• Oversee and help guide architectural decisions across the stack, including onboard autonomy, edge computing, and large‑scale data platforms, on and off our platforms.

• Partner closely with Hardware, Product, TPM, Security, and Operations leaders to deliver tightly integrated solutions.
• Support go‑to‑market and customer engagements by translating software capabilities into differentiated mission outcomes.

• 15+ years of experience in software engineering, including significant leadership of complex organizations.
• Proven success delivering mission‑critical, distributed, autonomous, or data‑intensive systems at scale.
• Comfortable co‑setting direction while independently driving execution.
• Deep technical fluency across modern software architectures, autonomy, data systems, and real‑time or embedded environments.
• Executive presence with the ability to influence technical and non‑technical stakeholders.

• Saildrone is the most sophisticated, reliable and widely deployed autonomous surface vehicle on the planet. We are deployed globally…