Careers
Small teams, real hardware
Fantom Defense is early. The work is unglamorous, the schedule is unforgiving, and the systems have to work when nobody is watching and nothing is talking. If that reads as a warning, it is meant to.
Why work here
01 / The honest pitch
What you would actually be doing
You would be building systems that have to keep working after the link dies — and that have to be able to prove, afterwards, exactly what they did and on whose authority.
That is a harder engineering problem than it sounds, and it is a rarer one. Most autonomy work in this industry is integration: take a model, take an airframe somebody else built, and connect them. We design the airframe and the brain together, and we build them on one campus. If you want to see a part you drew get cut, assembled, instrumented and flown, this is a company where the distance between those events is short enough to walk.
The second thing that makes the work unusual is the accountability requirement. Every observation, classification and engagement your code produces gets hash-chained and signed on the node, and the record is designed to be read by a judge advocate, an accident board or a Congressional committee. That constraint changes how you write software. You cannot ship a heuristic you cannot explain, and you cannot report a confidence number you have not calibrated, because both of them end up in a file somebody will read back to you.
We are also not going to pretend the résumé value is neutral. This is defense work. The systems are designed to be lethal, under human authorization, in a war we would all prefer not to have. If that is a line you do not want to cross, we would rather you decide that now than in month four, and we will not think less of you for it.
What we offer
- Scope
- Small teams with real ownership. Most people here are the only person doing what they do, which is either the best or the worst thing about the job depending on the week.
- Compensation
- Cash at market for the role and the location, plus equity. We publish a band for every role in the first conversation rather than asking what you make now.
- Health
- Medical, dental and vision with the premium covered for employees and dependants. Mental health cover with no visit cap.
- Retirement
- 401(k) with a match that vests immediately.
- Time
- Twenty days plus federal holidays, taken. Twelve weeks of parental leave for any new parent. Reserve and Guard duty is fully supported and paid.
- Clearance
- We sponsor. If you do not hold a clearance and the role needs one, that is our problem to solve, not a reason not to apply.
- Relocation
- Paid, including for the Savannah and FORGE-1 roles. Georgia is a serious place to build airframes and hulls and we will help you get there.
How we work
02 / Engineering culture
Eight rules
- Numbers, not adjectives
- Every claim in a review carries a unit and a tolerance. "Significantly better" is not a result. If you do not know, the answer is "I do not know yet, and here is how I will find out."
- One variable at a time
- Establish a clean baseline, then change one thing and measure it. Bundled changes produce bundled failures that nobody can attribute, and attribution is the whole product.
- Say where you are behind
- The public site says where we are behind — WRAITH has not flown, and the company page says so in those words. Internally the standard is the same: bad news travels at the speed of the person who found it.
- The gate is not negotiable
- Nobody ships a change that weakens the rules-of-engagement gate or the ledger to make a demonstration work. There is no schedule pressure that buys an exception, and the person who says no is right by default.
- Design for the worst day
- Every system is specified against the condition where it has no link, no GPS, no operator and no second chance. Nominal performance is a consequence, not a requirement.
- Build it before you brief it
- We would rather show a program officer a real ledger export from a test event than a slide about one. Hardware in a room beats a rendering.
- Written, not performed
- Decisions land in a document with a date and an author. Meetings are for the argument, not for the record, and a two-page memo beats a forty-slide deck every time.
- Field time is not optional
- Engineers go to the test site, the pier and the range. If your code has never been cold, wet, or refused by an operator, you do not yet know what it does.
Open roles
03 / 18 requisitions · updated July 2026
Before you apply
Until the corporate headquarters is announced, engineering sits with the program it supports: air and maritime in Savannah, manufacturing at the FORGE-1 site in Port Wentworth, flight test at Hunter Army Airfield, and autonomy distributed with regular time on-site. Remote roles are genuinely remote and genuinely expected to travel.
US person status is required for every role on this page — US citizen, lawful permanent resident, or a protected individual under 8 U.S.C. §1324b(a)(3) — because the work is subject to ITAR and the EAR. Where a role names a clearance, we sponsor it; you do not need to hold it on day one unless the listing says "active." A clearance requirement is a condition of the work, not a filter on who we think is good.
To apply, write to careers@fantom.aero with the requisition number in the subject line. A résumé and two paragraphs on something you built is enough. Do not send a cover letter and do not send anything export-controlled, proprietary to a current employer, or classified.
Autonomy & software — REVENANT
05 roles
Airframe & air systems
03 roles
Naval & maritime systems
03 roles
Subterranean systems
02 roles
FORGE-1 manufacturing
03 roles
FORGE-1 is a planned campus — a site under option, a permit path and a schedule. There is no building on the ground. These roles are the people who design the plant and qualify the processes before the slab is poured, working from Savannah and remotely until the site opens. We would rather say that now than at the offer stage.
MFG-501 Manufacturing Engineer, Composites & AFP Stand up autoclave and automated fibre placement for a 41.2 ft airframe at 300 a year. The capital is ordered two years before the building exists, so the process has to be right on paper first. Port Wentworth, GA MFG-508 Software Engineer, FORGE OS Provenance Hash every part from raw stock to fielded serial number. Manufacturing execution meets the ledger, and counterfeit-part defence is the deliverable. Secret eligibility. Port Wentworth, GA MFG-514 Welding Program Manager, Hull Fabrication Own the welder school we stand up with a regional technical college — it opens two years before keel one — and the qualification program behind every pressure-hull seam. Port Wentworth, GAMission operations & test
02 roles
Do not see your discipline? Write to careers@fantom.aero with the subject line OPEN and tell us what you would build here. We read all of them.
Veterans and transitioning service members
04 / Hiring
Why we recruit here first
The most expensive mistake in this industry is building a system that makes sense in a conference room and no sense at three in the morning in the rain.
The people who prevent that mistake are the ones who have carried the equipment. A maintainer who has turned a wrench on a flight line at 02:00 knows things about access panels and torque values that no requirements document contains. A submariner knows what a 45-metre position error means when you are the one holding depth. A sapper knows what a robot has to do underground before it is worth carrying. We hire veterans because that knowledge is the scarce input, not because it is a good thing to say on a careers page.
Concretely: military occupational specialties map to our roles more cleanly than most job descriptions admit, and we will do that translation for you. If your résumé is written in a language a civilian recruiter cannot parse, send it anyway and say so — it will be read by an engineer who can. We do not require a degree for any technical role where a qualification, a rating or demonstrated work substitutes.
We participate in SkillBridge and take transitioning service members on internships in the six months before separation, at the FORGE-1 site and in mission operations. Clearance sponsorship is straightforward when you already hold one; if yours has lapsed, that is normal and we will reinstate it. Reserve and Guard obligations are supported in full and paid — we schedule around drill weekends rather than asking you to.
Spouses of service members are a specific priority for the remote roles on this page, because a remote role that genuinely does not care where you live is worth more to a military family than any benefit we could write down.
Write to veterans@fantom.aero, or use the requisition number if you already know which role you want.
The process
05 / What happens after you write
Four steps, fourteen days
- 01 — Response
- An engineer reads your application, not a keyword filter. You get an answer within three business days either way, including no.
- 02 — Technical conversation
- An hour with the person who would work next to you, about something you have actually built. No whiteboard puzzles and no take-home project longer than two hours.
- 03 — The deep dive
- Two hours on a real problem from the program you would join, with the constraints we actually have. You will learn as much about us as we learn about you, which is the point.
- 04 — Offer
- A written offer with the band, the equity and the level, and a call with the chief engineer for the domain. Target from first contact to decision is fourteen days.
- Then
- Clearance processing and, where the role requires it, a Department of Defense background investigation. This part is not fast and we will tell you honestly how long it is running.
Fantom Defense is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on any protected basis, and we provide reasonable accommodation in the hiring process and on the job — tell us what you need at careers@fantom.aero and it will be handled by someone who is not on your interview panel. As a federal contractor we are also subject to affirmative action obligations for protected veterans and individuals with disabilities.