Engineering Manager, Autonomy Planning & Behaviors

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 an experienced engineer with a background in autonomous systems, aviation, and robotics who wants to lead Merlin’s direction when it comes to decision making and behaviors for mission autonomy. You understand both the commercial and military aviation domains, and enjoy pushing the boundaries on crewed and uncrewed technology to make aviation safer. You have deep experience in leading and managing large teams of engineers as they deploy autonomy, and have a broad understanding of the techniques enabling mission management.

Responsibilities:

• Drive the technical direction and delivery of autonomous decision making, behavior execution, and motion planning capabilities for airborne systems.

• Guide, mentor, and manage a team of engineers across a broad range of experience levels in developing software capabilities.

• Identify gaps and define staffing needs to develop and deliver decision making and behavior capabilities.

• Ensure the decision making, behaviors, and motion planning technical plans align with short term R&D objectives, long term objectives, and the Merlin technology roadmap.

• 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.

Qualifications:

• Degree in Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, Robotics Engineering, or a related subject.

• Strong experience developing software for airborne autonomous systems.

• Several years of experience providing direct management and technical leadership to a team of at least 10 engineers at different levels.

• Broad understanding and familiarity with 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.

  • Familiarity with 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.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with ROS , DDS, or similar middleware for robotics/autonomy systems.
• Experience with government open architectures such as A-GRA , OMS and FACE.
• Experience developing and/or using modern avionics systems.
• 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.

Logistics:

• We welcome remote applicants for this role, with a preference for candidates based in or willing to relocate to Boston, MA for a hybrid work schedule at our HQ.