Role: USV Pilot (Overnight Shift)
Location: San Diego, CA (in-office)
Typical working hours: 8 hour shifts that cover a 24 hour, 7 day a week operations schedule. This role requires weekends, nights, and holiday shifts. We operate three 8-hour shifts per day: 12 AM-8 AM, 8 AM-4 PM, and 4 PM-12 AM. Shift preferences are based on USV Pilot seniority.
Salary Range: $75,000 - $100,000 + stock options, 401k matching, and other benefits. Additional compensation is offered for evening and overnight shifts.
Role Overview:
Seasats operates a growing fleet of unmanned surface vessels (USVs) in real-world testing and customer environments. We’re hiring a USV Pilot to remotely operate and monitor these vessels from the Seasats Operations Center, supporting system development, validation, and customer missions. In this role, your judgment and attention to detail will help ensure vessel safety and mission success, while your operational feedback will guide improvements to our technology and procedures.
Role Details:
Day-to-day responsibilities include:
- Remotely piloting Seasats USVs through our UI during testing and customer operations
- Providing customer service and technical support as needed
- Monitoring live vehicle status, environment, and system behavior during active operations
- Responding to alerts, anomalies, or unexpected behavior in real time by interfacing with different internal teams
- Executing test plans and operational procedures as defined
- Communicating observations, issues, and feedback clearly to engineering and operations teams
- Logging events, issues, and results to support debugging, validation, and iteration
- Contributing to improvements in testing procedures, tooling, and operator workflows
- Develops mission briefs, debriefs, after action reports, and maintains standard operating procedures
About You:
You’re someone who is comfortable spending long stretches monitoring systems, making decisions based on incomplete information, and staying level-headed when things go wrong. You enjoy working with technology, following procedures, and being a key part of real-world operations. You thrive in a team environment while working effectively and independently when needed.
You’ll need to be:
- Able to work night shift
- Attentive, reliable, and detail-oriented
- Able to obtain a security clearance
- Comfortable operating software-driven systems and dashboards
- Calm under pressure and able to respond quickly to changing conditions
- A clear written and verbal communicator
- Safety-conscious and thoughtful in your decision-making
- Maritime or boating experience
In addition, it’s nice (though not essential) if you have:
- Experience with autonomous systems, robotics, or remote vehicle operation
- Experience with testing, QA, or field operations
- Familiarity with mapping tools, telemetry, or monitoring systems
- Experience with video games, simulators, or RC vehicles
- Prior military service
- Experience with Microsoft Suite and Google Drive
About Seasats:
At Seasats, we're passionate about delivering maritime robotics solutions to redefine the maritime industry. Our primary products are unmanned surface vessels (USVs), designed to carry sensors at sea for months at a time. Our USVs provide persistent monitoring and data acquisition to defense, scientific, and commercial customers, and have autonomously crossed both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. After thousands of years in which the only way to gather information from the ocean was to put people on a boat, these unmanned vessels are transforming how humanity monitors and interacts with the ocean. Here, you’ll find the space and opportunity to do your life’s best work.
Along with your salary, you’ll receive perks including:
- Stock options
- Competitive insurance (including a 99% employer-covered Gold HMO plan or other options)
- 401k matching up to 4% of salary
- Four free lunches per week
- An employee activity fund
- A pet-friendly office
- Unlimited/Flex PTO
Hiring Notes:
When applying, you’ll be asked to provide a resume and answer a few screening questions.
Please note that we are currently unable to sponsor employment visas, so candidates must be independently authorized to work in the United States.
Due to export control requirements applicable to this position, we are only able to consider U.S. persons, as defined by U.S. export control laws. This includes U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and individuals granted asylee or refugee status.
We appreciate diverse perspectives and life experiences, and we’re committed to building a team that reflects a wide range of backgrounds. Seasats provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination of any type based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under federal, state, or local law.
We look forward to reviewing your application!