Who Gets Hired, and Where They Land
ZeroMark, a defense technology company backed by Andreessen Horowitz, lists ten open roles across multiple locations: New York (seven roles), New Jersey, Pittsburgh, and Sarasota (three manufacturing-adjacent roles split across these sites), plus a single remote-eligible business development role in Washington, DC. No rotational program. No cohort of junior engineers learning on someone else's dime. No buffer between the person writing code and the operator who depends on it in combat. The question is not whether you can contribute; it is whether you can carry a subsystem from concept to fielded hardware without a handoff you control.
The company builds AI-driven counter-drone systems that neutralize threats in under two seconds. Its own site acknowledges that every existing approach has a critical flaw: lasers demand immobile power, jammers fail against fiber-optic and autonomous drones, interceptors cannot handle swarms, and net launchers only catch slow targets. The product is a bolt-on module that turns any weapon into a precision counter-drone system, deployed in minutes, with a software layer called Nexus that connects every deployment. As of September 2026, the team is small, the surface area wide, and the hiring bar narrow by design.
Six of the ten roles sit in engineering, split across software, hardware, mechanical, electrical, and machine learning operations. The software team is hiring a Computer Vision Engineer focused on object detection and tracking and a General Software Engineer; both sit in New York and work on the targeting stack that adjusts aim in milliseconds. The hardware side lists a Mechanical Design Engineer and an Electrical Design Engineer, also New York-based and on-site, plus a Senior Mechatronics Engineer (Robotics) who bridges the two disciplines. A Senior Machine Learning Operations Engineer rounds out the engineering cohort, owning the pipeline that moves models from training to deployed inference on edge hardware. These are not specialized silos. The job descriptions explicitly call for cross-functional collaboration with hardware engineers, data teams, and operators, and the seniority mix skews experienced: three senior titles, one director-level role, and six positions without a seniority tag that in practice require the autonomy to lead a workstream alone.
Outside engineering, the company is staffing a Manufacturing Manager and an Assembly Technician role, both on-site and distributed across those three sites. The technician role is the only trades-field opening on the board; the manufacturing manager sits in operations and owns the production flow for the bolt-on kits that ship to forward-deployed units. Business development carries two roles: a Head of Go-To-Market based remotely in Washington, DC, and a Senior Marketing Manager in New York. The marketing role asks for a degree in business, marketing, engineering, or military experience, a signal that the company expects its external messaging to speak the same technical language as its internal reviews.
Geography matters. Seven of the ten roles are anchored in New York, where the core R&D team sits. The two manufacturing-adjacent roles span the New Jersey, Pittsburgh, and Sarasota sites, a footprint that reflects where the hardware gets built, tested, and shipped. Only one role, the Go-To-Market lead, is marked remote-eligible; the rest are on-site or unspecified, and the company's careers page emphasizes that work is deployed in operational environments where reliability is essential from day one. That phrasing is not aspirational. It describes a team that ships to users who cannot tolerate a regression, and it shapes who gets through the door.
The candidate profile is specific: engineers who have shipped complete systems (not components) in regulated or safety-critical contexts; hardware people who can design for vibration, thermal, and power constraints without a dedicated analysis team; software engineers who understand that inference latency is a requirement, not an optimization target; and operators or business-facing hires who have lived the procurement cycle or the mission set. The company's own language — ownership, rigor, responsibility, judgment, accountability — maps directly to the scope of each role. A small team cannot absorb passengers. Every hire expands the system's surface area, and those who stay treat that surface area as their own.
Compensation: What the Board Shows
ZeroMark runs lean — a small, distributed team — and its compensation structure reflects a seed-stage defense tech company that hires slowly and expects broad scope from every seat. The company does not publish a single salary band document. Instead, each open role carries its own posted range on the Zero G Talent board, and those ranges are the only public, verifiable figures available.
The board currently shows six active roles, all full-time and on-site at one of two locations: New York, NY (headquarters) or New Jersey, NJ (manufacturing and test site). The roles span hardware, software, ML ops, mechanical design, manufacturing, and marketing, a spread that mirrors the product's blend of robotics, computer vision, and field-deployed systems.
| Role | Location | Posted on Zero G Talent Board |
|---|---|---|
| Senior Mechatronics Engineer (Robotics) | New York, NY | Yes |
| General Software Engineer | New York, NY | Yes |
| Senior Marketing Manager | New York, NY | Yes |
| Manufacturing Manager | New Jersey, NJ | Yes |
| Senior Machine Learning Operations Engineer | New York, NY | Yes |
| Mechanical Design Engineer | New York, NY | Yes |
Each listing includes a base salary range. Those ranges are not reproduced here because they are tied to the live posting and can shift when a role is re-leveled or re-opened. Candidates should open the specific role page to see the current band. The board is the authoritative source. Third-party aggregators often lag or scrape stale data.
Equity is granted to every full-time hire. The company is private, so grants are issued as incentive stock options (ISOs) or non-qualified options (NSOs) depending on the employee's tax status and the grant size. Vesting follows the standard four-year schedule with a one-year cliff: 25% vests at the one-year mark, then monthly thereafter. There is no public refresh policy; refresh grants, if any, are negotiated at promotion or exceptional contribution milestones. The option pool is sized for the current headcount plan and diluted only on priced rounds. ZeroMark has not announced a Series A, so the pool reflects seed and SAFE holders only.
Because the team is small, there is no formal compensation committee. Offers are approved by the founders and the head of operations. Negotiation room exists but is narrow, bands are set before the role posts, and the company optimizes for internal equity across the roster. A candidate who pushes significantly above the posted top of band will usually be told the role is leveled for a different scope.
Benefits are baseline for a venture-backed startup: medical, dental, vision, 401(k), and a hardware stipend. The differentiator is access: every engineer touches live hardware, flies to test events at Camp Atterbury, White Sands, and iSOF Range, and works directly with the operators who will use the system. That access is not priced into the offer letter, but it is the reason the hiring bar is narrow and the scope is broad.
U.S. citizenship is required for all roles due to government contract requirements. The New Jersey site handles manufacturing, integration, and range support; the New York site houses software, ML, mechanical design, and go-to-market. Relocation assistance has been approved case-by-case for senior hires moving to the New York metro area.
The bottom line: the posted ranges on the board are real, current, and the only numbers that matter. Equity is standard four-year vesting with a one-year cliff. The total package is built for people who want to ship hardware that gets used in the field next quarter, not for people optimizing for cash compensation at a later-stage company.
The Hiring Process: Stages, Screens, and What Gets You Through
ZeroMark does not publish a public hiring playbook. The careers page lists open roles but no funnel diagram, no timeline, and no named recruiters. What we can reconstruct comes from the six live postings there and from the profile of a small team backed by Andreessen Horowitz that ships hardware to special mission units in multiple countries.
The application starts with a resume and, for engineering roles, a GitHub or portfolio link. Recruiters screen for two things in that first pass: proof you've built systems that survive contact with reality, and evidence you can operate without a specification handed to you. The Head of Go-To-Market posting asks for "10+ years experience", language that signals they want someone who has already navigated long-cycle defense procurement. The Senior Machine Learning Operations Engineer role lists AI/ML experience as required across the board, echoing a pattern the broader market has noticed: "Experience with AI/ML required. This is showing up in job postings from developer to CTO," a hiring manager wrote on LinkedIn in 2024. At ZeroMark, that requirement isn't decorative; the product fuses sensors to interpret scenes and understand threats in real time. A candidate who cannot speak to model deployment, data pipelines, or edge inference will not clear the screen.
Technical screens come next. For software and ML roles, expect a live coding session focused on systems problems — concurrency, latency, memory — not algorithm puzzles. Hardware and mechatronics candidates walk through a design review: bring a project you led, explain the trade-offs you made, and defend them under scrutiny. The team is small enough that every interview is also a collaboration audition. Joel Anderson, the CEO, said the mission is building "a lifesaving tool" that "gives us a chance to effectively fight autonomous machines." That framing filters for people who treat reliability as a moral obligation, not a compliance checkbox.
A strong application does three things. It names the hard constraint you solved — thermal, latency, power, vibration — and quantifies the result. It shows you've worked across the stack: the Senior Mechatronics Engineer (Robotics) role sits at the intersection of mechanical design, embedded firmware, and perception; the General Software Engineer role expects comfort from kernel to cloud. And it demonstrates fluency with the defense context: ITAR awareness, security clearance eligibility, and an understanding that the customer is a warfighter who cannot reboot in the field.
What disqualifies a candidate? Vague ownership claims ("I led the team" without specifying what you decided). Pure research backgrounds with no shipping record. Inability to explain a failure you caused and what you changed afterward. And (implicit in every role) a mismatch with the pace of a team that has "clientele within the US that we're in evaluation stages with" and is "a little more mature in terms of international go-to-market." ZeroMark hires people who can widen the bottleneck, not people who need the bottleneck explained to them.
The final stage is usually a conversation with Anderson or a founding engineer. It is not a culture-fit chat. It is a technical alignment check: do you see the same problems they see, and do you want to solve them in the same way? The offer follows fast if the answer is yes. The equity grant and vesting terms are standard for an a16z-backed company (four-year vest, one-year cliff) but the scope of the role is not. At a small team across multiple locations, every hire changes what the company can attempt.
Where the Work Happens
ZeroMark operates from multiple locations, reflected in its live job postings: a New York, NY location that carries the bulk of engineering, marketing, and operations roles, and a New Jersey, NJ site listed for a Manufacturing Manager. A third data point: Michael Shawver, a Senior Mechanical Design Engineer, shows Petaluma, CA on his LinkedIn profile, suggesting either a distributed mechanical-engineering presence or a prior location the company has since consolidated. No dedicated Petaluma facility is documented today, so candidates should treat New York and New Jersey as the two confirmed physical workplaces.
The New York office hosts the roles that define ZeroMark's core product loop: Senior Mechatronics Engineer (Robotics), General Software Engineer, Senior Machine Learning Operations Engineer, Mechanical Design Engineer, and Senior Marketing Manager. That mix — mechatronics, ML ops, mechanical design, and general software — signals a space equipped for hardware-software integration. Building a "handheld Iron Dome" that fuses cameras, LIDAR, and real-time computer vision onto a weapon mount demands benches for actuator testing, optical tables for sensor calibration, and compute clusters for model training and inference optimization. The presence of a Senior Marketing Manager in the same location also means the New York site doubles as the outward-facing hub: demo preparation, partner visits, and the kind of rapid public positioning the company executed during the 2024 New Jersey drone sightings, when it went "in front of millions of Americans seizing the moment" within 72 hours.
The New Jersey listing for a Manufacturing Manager tells a different story. Manufacturing management at a small defense startup implies a production cell, not a volume factory, capable of low-rate initial production, quality documentation for DoD acceptance, and the configuration control required when every unit ships to a warfighter. The role sits in New Jersey, separate from the New York engineering cluster, which aligns with a common defense-tech pattern: design and algorithm work in one facility; assembly, test, and shipment in another with loading-dock access, ITAR-compliant storage, and space for environmental test gear. The company showcased its technology in real-world conditions at Red Sands in Saudi Arabia; that field-demo cadence requires a staging area where integrated systems are kitted, checked, and packed for austere-range deployment.
What a candidate should ask about: whether the New York site has a dedicated range or relies on partner facilities for live-fire validation, how much bench space each mechatronics engineer commands, whether the New Jersey cell runs a single shift or supports surge builds, and what the commute profile looks like for engineers who may split time between sites. The company's public posts emphasize iteration speed, "iteration after iteration, we've tested, refined, and improved," so the physical layout almost certainly optimizes for short loop cycles.
For a candidate, the takeaway is concrete: expect to work in New York if your role touches perception, control, or full-stack software; expect New Jersey if you own production quality, supply chain, or the transition from prototype to repeatable build. Petaluma appears only as a historical or remote data point. The multi-site model reflects a company that has moved past pure R&D into the "fielded in mission-critical environments" phase its own posts describe, and the workspace has been shaped to match.
Who Thrives Here
Just field-proven technology that saves lives. The line appears on the General Software Engineer posting and functions as a cultural filter. With such a team, ZeroMark does not have the headcount to support specialization for its own sake. Every hire must operate across the stack their role touches and often beyond it. The current board listings make this explicit: a Senior Mechatronics Engineer (Robotics), a Mechanical Design Engineer, and the Senior Machine Learning Operations Engineer all sit in New York; a Manufacturing Manager sits in New Jersey. The physical separation of manufacturing from the core engineering team means the people who thrive are the ones who can close the loop between a design change in New York and a production reality in New Jersey without a formal handoff process.
The defense context sharpens the requirement. That role asks for someone who can "build and maintain relationships with key decision-makers in the Department of Defense while leading proposal submissions and contract negotiations." That is not a pure sales motion; it is a hybrid of technical credibility, regulatory fluency, and long-cycle relationship management. The same posting expects the candidate to "develop and implement business development strategies to expand market presence within the defense sector." In a small company, the person doing that work is also the person answering technical questions from a program office at 6 p.m. on a Friday. Candidates who need a clear lane and a handoff to a capture team will not last.
The Manufacturing Manager posting adds another dimension: "Conduct performance reviews, provide constructive feedback, and foster a collaborative work environment." In a company this small, "collaborative" does not mean consensus-driven. It means the manufacturing lead has to give direct, uncomfortable feedback to the mechanical engineer whose tolerance stack just broke the production line, and the mechanical engineer has to take it, adjust the design, and walk the change to the floor themselves. A Wired piece from June 2024 questioned whether ZeroMark's "machine-learning aim-assist system" could deliver on its pitch. The company reached a $1 billion valuation by March 2026 — one of nine defense-tech unicorns — suggesting the team absorbed that skepticism, iterated in the field, and proved the system works. People who thrive here treat external doubt as a test plan, not a threat.
The role breadth is visible in the Senior Marketing Manager listing. At a Series A SaaS company, that role owns brand and demand gen. At ZeroMark, it likely owns export-control-compliant messaging, technical content for DoD reviewers, and recruiting narrative, all while the company scales from its current headcount to whatever the unicorn capital supports. The Senior MLOps Engineer role implies the ML pipeline is already in production on hardware that ships; the hire owns model deployment, monitoring, and retraining loops on edge compute with intermittent connectivity. That is not a research role. It is a reliability role dressed in ML tooling.
The common thread: ZeroMark selects for people who have already operated in environments where the cost of failure is measured in lives or contract termination, not sprint velocity. They hire engineers who have shipped hardware that passed military qualification, operators who have worked through the DoD acquisition maze, and builders who treat "field-proven" as a verb, something you do every week, not a slide you show once. If your career has been optimized for scope reduction, process adherence, or internal mobility, this is not the place. The hiring bar is narrow because the scope of each role is broad by necessity. The people who stay are the ones who would rather own the whole problem than a clean slice of it, and the bolt-on module on the workbench in New York is the only proof that matters.
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