SECTION I · THE BRIEF
Brief #35412Updated 21 AUG 2026SAN FRANCISCO, CAYcY COMBINATOR
Employbl Company Profile

Staff Software Engineer

Theseus is a defence and military technology company that designed, 3D-printed, and built a drone for GPS coordinates without a signal—using only a camera and Google Maps. DIY drones are effective but heavily reliant on…

Location
San Francisco, CA
Company size
5–10
Posted
2d ago
Via
Yc
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Staff Software Engineer · Theseus

View company profile
Job title
Staff Software Engineer
Job location
San Francisco, CA, US
Job listing URL
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/theseus/jobs/MHpXlcm-staff-software-engineer
Job description
Theseus is a defense company with offices in SF and Kyiv. We have customers in every branch of the USDOD, major defense primes, and our product is actively used in combat.  We build Cyclops, localization software that replaces GPS. It can use any camera (EO or IR) and runs on a Raspberry Pi 5 or similar level of compute. We fuse satellite data with camera input and onboard sensors to generate a reliable position that can’t be jammed. This is our second product, built using feedback from our first product which did the same thing but worse. This year, we expect to sell > 10,000 licenses. After two years, we have the best product available on the market, and demand is very high.  Our embedded localization and drone testing + integration teams are strong. Our software team is not strong. We have a lot of technical debt regarding our map generation backend and our companion application. While the deployment and QA process for our core localization algorithms are world class, the rest of our stack is not. \ \ We are looking for a staff software engineer with experience building and maintaining complex systems that just work. We hope you will grow into a VP of Engineering, and help us scale our deployments 1000x. What you will work on in your first 90 days: * Revamping our map generation server to power millions of square kilometers of map data without issues * Streamlining our OTA, CI/CD and automated QA * Drastically simplifying our companion application to deliver a stellar user experience * Improving our API’s on the edge device to support large volume customer frontends * Writing rules for coding agents to ensure that we can ship code quickly, while enforcing common standards across our codebase. Who we are looking for: * 7+ year of experience * You write great code that you are proud of * Proficient with Typescript, Python, AWS, Postgres, Modal, Linux * You have architected and refactored large amounts of code We have a built a product that customers love, and we’d like to be able to deliver it to them without things catching on fire.
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Where this role is based

San Francisco, CA

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Theseus headquarters

San Francisco, CA

Company size

5–10 employees

Founded

2024

Total raised

$4,800,000

View company profile ↗

Funding rounds

  • Seed$4.3M
  • Pre Seed$500K