Merlin Labs

Engineering Manager, Autonomy Planning & Behaviors

Boston or Remote · Contract

No sponsorshipDetected 343 days ago

PythonMachine LearningA/B TestingAccountingHRISAvionicsRoboticsAerospace EngineeringResearchLeadership

About the role

You understand both the commercial and military aviation domains, and enjoy pushing the boundaries on crewed and uncrewed technology to make aviation safer and to be a force multiplier for our military.
You want to focus more on leading and driving technical direction, but can get your hands dirty with day-to-day software development and experimentation when it's needed.
This position is based on-site at Merlin HQ in Boston, MA.

Drive the technical direction and deliver autonomous decision making, behavior execution, and motion planning capabilities for airborne systems.
Define the research, experiments, and development projects that support delivering mission autonomy capabilities.
Identify gaps and define staffing needs to develop and deliver decision making and behavior capabilities.
Lead architecture design and perform architecture and technology trade-off analysis, accounting for short term objectives and long term goals in decision making.
Support simulation, integration, and flight test activities to validate real-world performance.
Collaborate across Merlin to develop novel systems to solve the toughest problems in aviation and autonomy.

Degree in Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, Robotics Engineering, or a related subject.
Years of experience providing tech leadership to a team of at least 4 engineers at different levels.
Proficiency in modern software development workflows and practices, including version control, pipelines, and unit testing, and peer review.
Experience with overall product development cycle, including design, testing, and troubleshooting at the system level as well as at the software component level.
Proficiency writing both Python and C++.
Familiarity with simulation software, especially aircraft simulation.
Experience with proposal writing and technical roadmap development.
Years of professional experience developing software for airborne autonomous systems.
Subject matter expert in one or more of the following:
Mission management frameworks such as behavior trees, hierarchical task networks, state machines, petri nets.
Single- and multi-vehicle autonomy, resource allocation, and decision making algorithms.
Airborne contingency and emergency management.
Machine learning for complex decision making and behavior generation.

Experience with ROS, DDS, or similar middleware for robotics/autonomy systems.
Experience with government open architectures such as A-GRA, OMS and FACE.
Experience with hardware and software integration and debugging.
Experience with flight testing (uncrewed or crewed aircraft).
Awareness of aviation certification standards such as DO-178.
Pilot license and flight experience is a plus.
Merlin Labs is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity.
All job offers are contingent upon the candidate passing background and reference checks.

Merlin is a venture backed aerospace startup building a non-human pilot to enable both reduced crew and uncrewed flight.
Backed by some of the world's leading investors, Merlin is scaling alongside our customers to begin leveraging autonomy today to solve some of aviation's biggest challenges.

At this time, we are unable to provide visa sponsorship or consider candidates who require visa transfers.

This listing is sourced directly from Merlin Labs's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.