Who gets hired
9 Mothers has posted eight engineering roles in 30 days, all in Austin, all on-site, all demanding engineers who have closed the loop between perception code and kinetic hardware. This guide maps who the company hires, what it pays, how the interview loop runs, where the work happens, and what traits the team selects for, so candidates can decide whether to apply and how to prepare.
The company builds autonomous counter-drone systems from a single room in Austin. Founded in 2024 and backed by Y Combinator's P26 batch, 9 Mothers has grown to 19 people, booked $1.6 million in sales (Y Combinator's job posting reported), and delivered a system to the Department of Defense. Its product, EDDA, is an autonomous point-defense platform that detects, tracks, and neutralizes Group 1 drone threats — the cheap, fast, expendable FPV drones that rewrote close-range warfare in two years while legacy counter-UAS systems stayed built for fixed-wing intruders at altitude. The gap between threat iteration (weeks) and procurement cycles (decades) is the problem 9 Mothers exists to close.
That mission dictates the hiring mix. The team owns the full kill chain — perception, tracking, and engagement, vertically, so they don't hire narrow specialists who hand off to integrators. They hire engineers who can own a subsystem from sensor to actuator. The live board on Zero G Talent shows eight salaried roles across two functions: software and hardware, with perception and robotics as the connective tissue.
| Role | Level | Location | Base salary range (USD/yr) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Embedded Engineer (BSP), Staff | Staff | Austin | $250,000 – $300,000 |
| Perception Engineer, Staff | Staff | Austin | $250,000 – $300,000 |
| Computer Vision Engineer, Senior | Senior | Austin | $150,000 – $250,000 |
| Machine Learning Engineer, Senior | Senior | Austin | $150,000 – $250,000 |
| Robotics Engineer, Senior | Senior | Austin | $150,000 – $250,000 |
| Senior Mechatronics Engineer | Senior | Austin | $150,000 – $250,000 |
| Lead Mechatronics Engineer | Lead | Austin | $250,000 – $400,000 |
| Robotics Engineer, Staff | Staff | Austin | $250,000 – $400,000 |
On the software side, openings cluster around computer vision and machine learning at the edge. A Perception Engineer, Staff, a Computer Vision Engineer, Senior, and a Machine Learning Engineer, Senior, all on-site. The perception stack runs on embedded hardware with real telemetry from range tests, not cloud inference. That pulls candidates from autonomous vehicle perception teams, military targeting systems, and robotics labs where latency and compute budgets are hard constraints.
Robotics and mechatronics form the other half. A Robotics Engineer, Senior and a Robotics Engineer, Staff bracket a Senior Mechatronics Engineer and a Lead Mechatronics Engineer. The spread from senior to lead reflects a team that promotes from within and hires ahead of the next integration milestone. An Embedded Engineer (BSP), Staff rounds out the board, handling board support package work for the compute module that ties perception to the kinetic effector.
The board's salary band runs $150,000 to $400,000 with a median of $275,000. Staff and lead positions dominate the upper end ($250,000–$400,000); senior individual-contributor roles sit at $150,000–$250,000. That shape, heavy on experienced ICs who lead subsystems without becoming managers, matches the operating model: small batches, fast cycle time, real telemetry, instrumented in the field. No multi-year waterfall.
The surge is recent. Seedtable tracked eight new engineering postings in a 30-day window and nine live roles total across the company's ATS as of late September 2026. The Ashby board lists six open positions: Executive Chief of Staff, Manufacturing Engineering Lead, Senior Optomechanical Engineer, Perception Engineer, Robotics Software Engineer, and UAS Pilot — a rare operator-facing role that feeds range data back into the perception loop. The careers page adds audio ML, DSP, and systems to the wanted list, with an explicit note: if you don't see your exact role, send a note anyway.
Founder backgrounds signal the profile they select for. Roman Khomenko, Russell Smith, and Bogdan Pyzh came from environments where hardware shipped on tight loops: autonomous systems, defense tech, and robotics platforms that had to work in the field, not the lab. Their hiring record since YC reflects that filter: every open role demands experience closing the loop between software intent and hardware reality, whether that's a perception engineer who's debugged false positives on a moving platform or a mechatronics lead who's designed for manufacturability at attrition-scale cost.
The team is still small enough that a new hire owns a system, not a Jira ticket. That's the filter. If you've shipped a perception pipeline that ran on an embedded Jetson in the dust, or designed a gimbal that survived vibration testing and still hit its weight budget, the conversation starts fast. If your experience lives in slide decks and requirements documents, it doesn't.
What it pays
Two clear bands emerge. Senior roles cluster at $150,000–$250,000 — a $100,000 spread reflecting years of experience, publication record, and whether the candidate has shipped hardware to fielded systems. Staff and Lead roles sit at $250,000–$300,000 for perception and embedded positions, and $250,000–$400,000 for the two lead robotics and mechatronics slots. The wider band on the lead roles shows 9 Mothers will pay a premium for engineers who can span requirements through flight qualification.
All eight postings are in Austin. The local defense-robotics labor pool keeps competing offers high. 9 Mothers' bands are calibrated to win cross-offers.
The founders come from cultures where compensation transparency was standard. Posting bands publicly is a recruiting filter: it self-selects candidates who know their market value and discourages negotiations that stall at the offer stage. The board shows no variable or equity columns; the listed ranges are base salary only. Candidates should ask for the strike price and liquidation preferences during the process.
If you're targeting the Senior band, come with a portfolio of shipped sensors, actuators, or perception stacks that have survived vibration, thermal, and EMI qualification. For Staff and Lead roles, the interview loop will test whether you've led a cross-functional bring-up (mechanical, electrical, firmware, test) and can articulate the trade-offs you made when schedule, weight, and power budget collided. The pay reflects that scope.
How the loop runs
The interview loop at 9 Mothers follows a compressed three-stage structure. Publicly posted process details for a Robotics Software Engineer role show: a 30-minute recruiter screen, a 90-minute virtual panel with a peer engineer plus either the SWE Director or VP over Microsoft Teams, and a full-day onsite (roughly six hours) with the CTO, Director, VP, and additional peers. The company flies out non-local candidates for the final round.
Recruiter screens focus on baseline alignment: visa status, timeline, compensation expectations, and a quick technical sanity check. Candidates who advance have already signaled they operate at the staff or senior level, so the screen filters for communication clarity and genuine interest in the defense-robotics intersection rather than basic qualification.
Disqualifiers are practical. Candidates who cannot commit to Austin onsite work exit early. A week of silence after the onsite warrants one polite follow-up to the recruiter; longer gaps usually mean the role was paused or the slate reset. Processes stretching past six weeks consistently lose preferred candidates to competitors, and top talent stays on the market only 10–20 days. 9 Mothers' three-stage loop, when scheduled tightly, can clear a candidate in under three weeks, but only if each calendar slot is pre-booked before the prior round concludes.
Where the work happens
9 Mothers operates from a single headquarters at 1606 Headway Circle, Suite 9691, in northeast Austin, adjacent to the outdoor ranges the team uses for live-fire and flight testing. The careers page lists every role as "Austin · onsite · range adjacent." The LinkedIn posting for the R&D Test Engineer role confirms it: onsite, Austin, TX, direct hire. No remote option, no satellite office. The company's own site puts it plainly: "AI mission systems. Built in Austin."
The lab is new: a "brand-new lab fully optimized for rapid prototyping, equipped with NVIDIA Jetsons, high-end scopes, and 3-D printers." That equipment list matters. The Jetsons are the compute backbone for the EDDA turret's perception stack; the scopes let electrical and RF engineers debug the turret's sensor suite and fire-control electronics at the bench; the printers turn mechanical iterations around in hours instead of weeks.
Range adjacency is not a marketing phrase. The EDDA system — a kinetic point-defense turret that engages Group 1 and 2 drones at 10–100 meters with a cost per defeat under ten dollars, requires live targets, live radar cueing, and live fire. The company's own posts document the result: at Fort Bragg's Sandhills experimentation, the turret was mounted on a Hypercraft Razorback unmanned ground vehicle running Forterra's AutoDrive autonomy stack. An August Army test folded EDDA onto an autonomous F-250 to prove a single vehicle could clear obstacles and defeat drones without a separate escort.
The team also integrates with Spotter Global radars, a partnership announced in September 2026, which means the lab must accommodate third-party sensor hardware and the cabling, power, and software interfaces that come with it.
The onsite model is deliberate. The LinkedIn posting for the test engineer role emphasizes "high-bandwidth collaboration and rapid field-testing" and offers relocation assistance. With 11–50 employees, the entire company fits in one building: founders, perception engineers, robotics software, electrical, manufacturing, integration, and the field applications engineers who deploy with operators. Every open role is located in Austin. No distributed teams, no time-zone handoffs.
That physical concentration shapes how the company shows up at industry events. At AUSA 2026, 9 Mothers shared a booth with Forterra and Hypercraft, demonstrating the integrated Razorback–AutoDrive–EDDA stack.
The facility is a working prototype shop with a range gate a few minutes away. That proximity lets the team close the loop between a code change in the perception pipeline and a confirmed intercept on the range in the same sprint.
Who thrives here
The clearest signal comes from the team's own careers page, which reads less like a recruiting pitch and more like a filter. "If you've ever shipped hardware inside a slow program of record and thought we should be doing this in months, not years — this is the team for you." That sentence selects for a specific frustration: engineers who have lived inside traditional defense acquisition cycles, watched requirements ossify, and want to prove the same capability can be delivered on a timeline measured in weeks. The founders built 9 Mothers in 2024 after careers spanning autonomous systems, robotics, and defense hardware; they hired 19 people in Austin and put $1.6 million in counter-drone systems into DoD hands within the first year. The pace is the point.
Ownership is framed as the alternative to process. The careers page summarizes it as owning a system rather than a Jira ticket, signaling that the organization doesn't have the headcount for narrow specialization: each engineer touches perception, planning, and the metal it runs on. The spread ($150,000 to $400,000, median $275,000) reflects a team that pays for breadth and depth in the same person.
Iteration philosophy is explicit: "Short loops, real telemetry. Range time, range data, range fixes. We instrument what we build and we iterate on what the data tells us — not on what the roadmap deck promised six months ago." Candidates who need a stable spec before writing code will self-select out. The workflow demands comfort with ambiguity, the ability to design a test that produces signal on the range, and the discipline to let that signal redirect the architecture.
That loops into the operator-first constraint: "Operators are users. Mass, setup time, and human factors are first-class specs. The people carrying it are in the loop from week one, not at acceptance testing."
Affordability is treated as an engineering discipline, not a procurement afterthought: "Built to be afforded. Cost-per-shot, serviceability, and manufacturability are design constraints. We're building weapons the U.S. and its allies can afford to use at scale." That selects for people who have designed for volume production, who know the bill of materials at the schematic stage, and who treat sustainment as part of the architecture.
The hiring call reinforces the breadth: "We're hiring across audio ML, DSP, systems, and software. If you don't see the exact role but you'd be the right person, send us a note anyway. Recruiters should not contact us." The last line is deliberate: the team wants direct signal from builders, not filtered through agency keywords.
The Indeed reviews attached to the "Mothers" name are largely from a restaurant business (reviews dated 2017–2019, years before this company existed) and don't reflect the defense-tech operation. The relevant record is the Y Combinator-backed startup that shipped a DoD program in year one, pays senior engineering bands, and publishes its philosophy as a filter. The people who stay are the ones who read those lines and recognize their own frustration and their own speed.
The turret on the range in Texas is the same turret on the demo floor in D.C. — built in Austin, tested at the range gate, shipped to the customer. That loop is the job.
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