Four engineers. One system.

Askarl Defense is a small team with concentrated expertise: radar and sensor systems, Army acquisition and systems test, computer vision and edge inference, and defense operations. Huntsville's defense corridor — Redstone Arsenal, AMCOM, UAH — is where this team comes from and where we operate.

Robbie Zyl, CEO and Co-Founder of Askarl Defense
Robbie Zyl
CEO & Co-Founder

Robbie founded Askarl Defense in 2024 following contractor work in the Huntsville defense corridor, where he observed the widening gap between drone threat capability and soft-kill response options. His focus is the engagement latency problem: the narrow window between swarm detection and perimeter breach. ARES-1 is designed to operate inside that window autonomously.

Marcus Tahl, CTO and Co-Founder of Askarl Defense
Marcus Tahl
CTO & Co-Founder

Radar systems engineer with 12 years in defense electronics. Spent the prior decade developing RCS characterization methods and radar signal processing for a defense subcontractor based in the Huntsville corridor. Leads ARES-1's phased-array sensor design, signal processing pipeline, and AI processing hardware architecture.

Priya Selvan, VP Systems Engineering at Askarl Defense
Priya Selvan
VP Systems Engineering

Defense systems integration specialist with a background in Army acquisition support and systems test and evaluation. Priya owns the requirements traceability matrix for ARES-1, coordinates compliance documentation across ITAR and MIL-STD frameworks, and manages the verification and validation process against both military and infrastructure customer requirements.

Eli Doran, Lead AI/ML Engineer at Askarl Defense
Eli Doran
Lead AI/ML Engineer

Computer vision and signal processing engineer. Built multi-sensor object classification pipelines for aerial surveillance applications before joining Askarl. Designed the multi-modal fusion architecture underlying ARES-1's threat classification — combining RCS temporal signature, EO/IR optical profile, and kinematic feature extraction to achieve sub-120ms inference at the edge.

The team is small and will stay focused. We are not building a software platform or an integration middleware company — we are building one hardware system that intercepts drones reliably in the scenarios that matter. Headcount grows when the engineering problem requires specific expertise, not as a size signal.

We are hiring for three specific roles. Background in defense electronics, Army acquisition, or edge AI is what we need — not general software engineering. See Careers.