Role: USV Watch Floor Manager

Location: San Diego, CA (in-office)

Salary: $90,000 - $110,000 / yr + stock options, 401k matching, and other benefits

Role Overview:

Seasats operates a growing fleet of unmanned surface vessels (USVs) continuously, often for months at a time, in real-world environments. Every mission depends on the quality of the watch.

We're hiring an USV Watch Floor Manager to lead the team responsible for monitoring and piloting these vessels. This role is a perfect fit for a strong people leader, someone who can keep a team organized, engaged, and supported, and can also sign up for a piloting shift when needed. This person will keep the watch floor running smoothly 24/7, ensuring pilots are sharp, engaged, and making sound decisions when it matters.

Piloting is focused work, requiring long stretches of monitoring punctuated by moments where judgment and response time matter. Some missions are relaxed and require an on-call presence to react to automated alerting, while others require intense focus. Your job is to keep the team focused, attentive, and ready to respond through all of it.

Role Details:

Day-to-day responsibilities include:

• Leading a team of USV pilots across 24/7 shift coverage
• Building and maintaining the pilot schedule, including nights, weekends, and surge periods
• Setting the tone on the watch floor and keeping the team motivated and engaged through long shifts
• Building team morale, creating mentoring and feedback structures, and fostering a sense of team pride for a job well done
• Managing different personalities through stressful operational moments and customer missions
• Coaching pilots on procedures, judgment calls, and how they communicate with customers, engineering and ops
• Running watch handoffs, shift briefs, and after-action reviews
• Occasionally piloting USVs during testing and customer operations, including weekend shifts
• Partnering with engineering, ops, and customer success on test plans, anomaly response, and procedure improvements
• Owning hiring, onboarding, and performance management for the pilot team
• Driving improvements to tooling, workflows, and watch floor culture
• Coordinating watch floor responses to customer needs in collaboration with appropriate internal stakeholders

About You:

You bring energy into a room and can handle a 12-hour shift. You've managed people before, you know how to read a team, and you're not afraid to have a direct conversation when something needs to change.

You'll need to be:

• An experienced people manager who leads through influence, not just authority
• Upbeat and engaging -- the kind of person who keeps a long shift from feeling long
• Calm under pressure, especially when the team is watching how you respond
• Highly organized, with the ability to manage complex scheduling and coverage
• Comfortable having direct conversations about performance and behavior
• A clear written and verbal communicator
• Willing to work non-traditional hours, including nights and weekends when ops require it
• Safety-conscious and thoughtful in your decision-making
• Familiar with maritime best practices and boat operations
• Comfortable operating software-driven systems and dashboards
• Able to obtain a security clearance

In addition, it's nice if you have:

• Prior experience managing shift-based teams (ops centers, dispatch, watch floors, control rooms, flight ops, etc.)
• Experience operating autonomous systems, robotics, or similar systems
• Experience building schedules across 24/7 coverage
• Familiarity with mapping tools, telemetry, or monitoring systems
• Experience with testing, QA, or field operations

Along with your salary, you'll receive perks including:

• 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.

We look forward to reviewing your application!