Why Online Oceans
Most of the ocean is unmonitored because ships are expensive and buoys do not move. Scout changes that: a small, solar-powered USV that one person launches from a beach and that runs for months on station at roughly 200× lower cost than a research vessel. Our boats are already at sea for marine mammal monitoring, subsea cable protection, illegal fishing detection and ocean science.
We are early. Joining now means owning a whole system rather than a corner of one, seeing your code go to sea within weeks, and shaping how the company engineers for the next decade. Founded in November 2023, we are backed by venture investors and work with organisations including the Royal Navy, NATO, Ocean Infinity and Sonardyne.
We hire people who care about the outcome. Every mission we run either measures the ocean or protects it, and we want colleagues who find that worth getting wet for.
Open roles
Two roles, both full time and hybrid from Christchurch, Dorset: a Software Engineer (Robotics) to own the software on every Scout, and an Integration Engineer, our first forward-deployed engineer, to own sensor integrations and the customers behind them.
Software Engineer (Robotics)
The role. You will own SentryOS, the Linux software that runs on every Scout. It talks to the autopilot, manages power and comms, runs the payloads, streams telemetry to shore and keeps the boat alive for months on an intermittent satellite link. Today it is built and maintained by the founding team alongside everything else. You will be its first dedicated owner, and you will also own how it is tested before a boat leaves the yard.
What you will do
- Own and evolve a Python and Bash fleet operating system on Raspberry Pi: around 16 systemd services with memory limits, watchdogs and self-healing restarts, built to run for months at sea.
- Integrate and tune ArduPilot Rover over MAVLink: mission upload, parameter baselines, custom Lua scripts and flight-log forensics.
- Keep multi-path comms robust on bad links: Starlink with failover, Iridium satellite messaging, 4G, acoustic modems, AIS and NMEA broadcast.
- Build the automated test process from scratch. There is none today beyond lint. Unit tests for protocol parsers and encoders, autopilot software-in-the-loop integration tests, a hardware-in-the-loop bench, and a scripted acceptance and soak suite that replaces a manual one-hour checklist.
- Own release gating: golden-image builds, provisioning, staged rollout from development to production boats, and the go or no-go call before a fleet-wide push.
- Investigate field incidents from logs and telemetry, then fix the class of problem rather than the instance.
- Work alongside the STM32 and FreeRTOS power firmware, the payload integrations (hydrophones, sensor chains, cameras, edge computer vision) and the team building our Tether fleet software.
- Go to the water. Sea trials and commissioning happen on the Dorset coast and you will be there for them.
What we are looking for
- 7+ years shipping software on Linux for physical systems: robots, vehicles, instruments or industrial equipment.
- Strong Python and shell, and comfortable in C when the work reaches a microcontroller.
- Deep, practical Linux: systemd, networking, device-tree overlays, serial and I2C and SPI buses, USB quirks, disk and boot on embedded boards.
- You have built a test and release process for hardware before and can show what it caught.
- Experience with ArduPilot, PX4, MAVLink or a comparable autopilot stack, or a strong reason to think you will pick it up fast.
- Pragmatic and happy owning a system end to end, from a bug report on a boat 40 miles offshore to a merged fix and a redeployed fleet.
- Passionate about protecting the ocean. This is a requirement, not a nice-to-have. Tell us why in your application.
- The right to work in the UK.
Nice to have
- Marine or maritime experience, including small-boat handling.
- STM32, FreeRTOS or similar embedded firmware.
- Computer vision on resource-limited edge devices.
- Satellite or long-range radio comms.
How to apply. Email your CV and a few lines on the most demanding physical system you have shipped to hello@onlineoceans.com with the subject line "Software Engineer (Robotics)".
Integration Engineer
The role. Scout is only as useful as the data it brings home, and every customer wants a slightly different instrument on it. You will be our first forward-deployed engineer: the person who sits with a customer's scientists or sensor team, scopes the integration, builds it on the vehicle, proves it at the bench and at sea, and stays with the deployment until the data is flowing in the format they need. You will work hand in hand with our field engineering team and spend a lot of your time away from Dorset, at customer sites, on quaysides and on the water. Today that covers hydrophones, wave and wind sensors, temperature chains, acoustic modems, cameras and AIS, plus the open Scout Adapt payload bay that lets customers fit their own. You will make each new instrument a repeatable integration rather than a one-off project.
What you will do
- Own customer integrations end to end: scoping with the customer, power, wiring and mounting, serial, RS-485 Modbus, Ethernet or USB interfaces, drivers and parsers on the vehicle, and data products in the customer's format.
- Make the physical integration work: wire and fuse a sensor into the payload bay, check it on a multimeter, and design and print the bracket, housing or cable guide it needs in the workshop.
- Be the technical face of Online Oceans on site: at the customer's lab, on the quayside for launch, and on the call when something at sea needs explaining.
- Own the sensing software already on the boat: hydrophone recording and edge acoustic detection, metocean sensors, multi-node temperature and CTD chains, acoustic modem gateways for subsea data harvesting, AIS and camera pipelines.
- Keep data honest: timestamps disciplined to GPS, calibration and metadata captured with every file, gaps and faults detected on the boat rather than found by the customer.
- Build a bench and a test set for every supported instrument, including simulators so a partner can integrate against Scout before their hardware arrives.
- Write the integration guides and data specifications that let Scout Adapt customers fit an instrument themselves, and feed what you learn in the field back into the product.
- Deploy with the field engineering team: sea trials on the Dorset coast, and customer deployments in the UK and overseas. Expect frequent travel.
What we are looking for
- 5+ years of software or field engineering for instruments, sensors or data acquisition on embedded Linux.
- Solid software engineering: strong Python, and disciplined about version control, tests and documentation even when working out of a van.
- Basic electronics: reading a schematic, power budgets, wiring and connectors, fusing, and a multimeter or logic analyser when something does not answer.
- Basic 3D printing and CAD: you can design a bracket or housing, print it, and iterate until it survives salt water.
- Hands-on with serial buses, RS-485 and Modbus, NMEA, Ethernet and USB devices.
- Experience with time-series or acoustic data: sample rates, timestamps, file formats, and the difference between a recording and a dataset.
- Good with customers. You can turn a vague requirement from a scientist or a defence sensor team into a scoped integration, and you keep them informed when it slips.
- Happy at a bench, on a pontoon and in a customer meeting in the same day, and up for a lot of travel. This role is often on the road.
- Passionate about protecting the ocean. This is a requirement, not a nice-to-have. Tell us why in your application.
- The right to work in the UK.
Nice to have
- Oceanographic instrumentation: CTD, ADCP, hydrophones, wave sensors, acoustic modems.
- Signal processing or machine learning on acoustic or image data at the edge.
- Marine field experience, including small-boat handling.
- Previous forward-deployed, field applications or solutions engineering work.
How to apply. Email your CV and a few lines on the hardest integration you have delivered for a customer to hello@onlineoceans.com with the subject line "Integration Engineer".
What we offer
- Competitive salary.
- Hybrid working from our base in Christchurch, Dorset, minutes from the water.
- Early-joiner ownership of a system that matters, in a team of 17 where your decisions ship.
- Venture-backed runway and a customer base that already includes navies, research institutes and offshore operators.
- Time on the water and the satisfaction of watching your work sail away.
We read every application ourselves and reply to all of them. No agencies, please. We keep applicant details for six months after a decision; see the job applicants section of our privacy policy.
No role that fits?
We are growing and add roles as the fleet does. If you are an engineer, scientist or operator who wants to work on ocean robotics, send a CV and tell us what you would do here.