This role requires US citizenship. Due to the nature of our work at the intersection of critical minerals and national security-relevant autonomous systems, we are only able to consider US citizens at this time.
As Pluton's Founding Autonomy Engineer, you will own the autonomy that turns Pluton's belief about the subsurface into action in the field. You sit above the sensing platforms and command them, deciding where they go and what they measure so their returns feed back and sharpen the model. You will build the value-of-information policy and mission planning that convert NOUS posteriors into the next best measurement and the commands a platform executes, and you will own the systems integration that makes the model, the planning layer, and the hardware operate as one loop. You will work directly with the founders, the NOUS and CARTA teams, and the aerial and ground platform engineers. This is a founding role with significant influence over how the system is architected.
You build the closing edge of Pluton's closed loop. NOUS holds a Bayesian belief over the subsurface and scores every candidate measurement by its expected value of information. You turn those scores into directed action: the next best measurement to take, the path to take it, and the commands the platform executes. This is the layer that makes NOUS act on the world rather than only describe it, and it dispatches whichever platform fits the task, aerial or ground. Your work defines how belief becomes motion in the field.
You have shipped autonomy that ran on real hardware in the field, not only in simulation. You are strong in robotics autonomy and decision-making under uncertainty, specifically informative path planning and active sensing or Bayesian optimal experimental design, and you are hands-on with an autonomy stack (PX4 or ArduPilot, ROS2, MAVLink) with real comfort in coordinate frames and geodesy. Candidates may come from autonomy startups such as Exyn, Shield AI, Skydio, Zipline, or Anduril, from field robotics research labs such as ETH ASL, CMU, MIT, or Sydney ACFR, or from autonomous science at NASA JPL. Exposure to mineral exploration, geophysical survey, remote sensing, or GPS-denied navigation is a plus. A strong passion for working on problems that matter at a national and civilizational scale is as important as technical depth.
This is a founding role at an early-stage company. Compensation is equity-based until our next funding round, which we are actively closing. Upon funding, the role transitions to a full salary and equity package commensurate with a senior founding engineer. Candidates must be US citizens. This requirement is non-negotiable and is tied to the nature of our technology and the industries we operate in.
Critical minerals underpin the supply chains of modern civilization. Copper, lithium, rare earth elements, and other strategic materials power energy infrastructure, electric transportation, advanced manufacturing, and computing systems. Yet discovering new mineral deposits remains slow and uncertain. Pluton is building a system that can autonomously find, validate, and guide the extraction of these minerals at a speed and scale the industry has never seen. Autonomy is the system's decision-making core — the layer that decides what to measure next and sends the platforms to go measure it. The engineer who builds it is the point where belief becomes action, and where the whole loop finally closes.