Autonomy Software Engineer

Merlin (NASDAQ: MRLN) is a publicly traded aerospace and defense company building a non-human pilot to deliver full-stack autonomy for any aircraft from takeoff to touchdown. The Merlin Pilot autonomy system powers a growing range of aircraft and mission profiles and has been proven through hundreds of autonomous flights from Merlin's global flight test facilities, including Kerikeri, New Zealand; Smithfield, Rhode Island; and soon, Bedford, Massachusetts. Headquartered in Boston, Merlin is expanding its organization to accelerate the development and deployment of its autonomy platform, helping customers solve some of aviation's most pressing challenges, from pilot shortages to improving flight safety. Backed by some of the world's leading investors prior to its public listing, Merlin continues to advance the certification and commercialization of autonomous flight across commercial and defense aviation.

About You:

You are a versatile software engineer with a passion for aviation, robotics, and autonomous systems. You are comfortable working across technical domains, from perception and understanding to decision making and human-machine teaming. You take pride in delivering high-quality, maintainable code, collaborate well with other engineers and teams, and like to independently dig into new problems. You’re excited to see your code fly in the real world.

Responsibilities:

• Develop software across the stack of an aircraft autonomy system, contributing to lower level embedded systems and higher level autonomy function areas as needed.
• Implement and integrate algorithms for perception, reasoning, decision making, planning, and execution in support of autonomous airborne operations.
• Collaborate with domain leads to understand architecture, requirements, and design intent for specific capabilities.
• Contribute to simulation, integration, and flight test activities to validate autonomy software in relevant environments.
• Write, test, document and review code according to Merlin’s development standards.
• Collaborate across Merlin to develop novel, certifiable systems to solve the toughest problems in aviation and autonomy.

Qualifications:

• Degree in computer science, aerospace engineering, robotics, or a related field.
• BS and 3+ or MS and 2+ years of experience developing software for robotic or autonomous systems.
• Experience with state machines, behavior trees, or task planning algorithms.
• Experience with route, path and trajectory planning.
• Experience with Linux and open-source development tools.
• Experience with overall product development cycle, including design, testing, and troubleshooting at the system level as well as at the software component level.
• Experience with both Python and C++.
• Experience with ROS, DDS or similar robotics middleware.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to learn and contribute across different technical domains.

Nice to Have:

• Experience developing autonomy software for aircraft, drones, or other high-integrity systems.
• Experience with perception systems, sensor fusion, or world modeling concepts.
• Experience with multi-agent collaboration and human-machine interfaces.
• Experience with system integration, simulation, or flight testing of autonomous platforms.
• Experience with hardware and software integration and debugging.
• Pilot license and flight experience is a plus.