Senior Platform Engineer

Description

The company builds unmanned systems for defense. It designs and manufactures them to rebuild the US drone industrial base, and its systems are tested in combat, developed quickly and built at large scale.

The team works to shorten the time between design and fielding, with the goal of getting capability to warfighters in months rather than years.

The role builds the onboard software platform that all of the company's autonomy software runs on. You will work on the Autonomy Platform and Runtime team.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain the autonomy runtime and middleware integration layer, covering module interfaces, process and thread structure, message passing and execution rates. All other autonomy code is written against it.
• Own real-time scheduling, latency accounting and deadline monitoring on target hardware. Measure end-to-end sensor-to-actuator latency under sustained thermal load, and build the instrumentation that lets latency be enforced as a release gate.
• Design and implement high-rate onboard logging, including ring buffer and triggered capture, multi-sensor and video streams, storage and bandwidth budgets, and log integrity checks, without hurting control loop timing.
• Implement hardware timestamping and time synchronization across sensors, mission compute and the flight controller. Represent clock domains and sync state in logged data so flights can be replayed deterministically.
• Support hardware-in-the-loop bench infrastructure and field test operations, including on-site flight test support. Fix platform-level timing, logging and integration defects found in flight data.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of professional experience building production embedded, robotics or real-time software, with individual technical delivery on systems that operate outside a lab.
• Hands-on experience getting software onto a physical vehicle or embedded platform, such as unmanned aircraft, ground or aerial robots, autonomous vehicles, or automotive or aerospace systems. You have owned the work through bring-up, integration and field operation, not only simulation or research.
• Expert in modern C++ on embedded Linux, and working knowledge of Python for tooling, analysis and automation, written under real-time and resource constraints.
• Hands-on work in a robotics or vehicle middleware layer covering inter-process communication, message passing, module interface definition, process and thread structure and execution scheduling, using ROS 2, DDS, Zenoh, LCM or a proprietary equivalent.
• Deep real-time systems skills, including scheduling policies and priorities, CPU affinity and isolation, lock-free or zero-copy data paths, jitter and deadline analysis, and measuring end-to-end latency distributions on real hardware rather than in simulation.
• Experience building high-rate onboard logging with ring buffer and triggered capture, multi-sensor and video streams, storage and bandwidth budgeting, and log integrity, delivered without degrading control loop timing.
• Experience implementing time synchronization and hardware timestamping across sensors, compute and a flight or vehicle controller, using PTP, gPTP, PPS, sensor trigger lines or equivalent, and reconciling multiple clock domains in logged data.
• Experience developing and debugging sensor drivers and data paths for cameras and inertial sensors over interfaces such as MIPI CSI-2, GMSL, USB3 Vision, GigE Vision, SPI or I2C, and managing calibration data alongside the sensor streams it applies to.
• Unmanned aircraft experience, including integrating an onboard mission computer with a flight controller or autopilot such as PX4, ArduPilot or MAVLink, or a proprietary equivalent. You are familiar with arming logic, flight modes and failsafe behavior at that boundary.
• Experience with thermal or other non-visible imaging payloads, including helping select sensors, driver bring-up, and handling the calibration and data differences from visible-spectrum cameras.
• Experience designing or building hardware-in-the-loop benches, including sensor simulation and injection, hardware timestamp instrumentation, and adding a HIL bench to automated release gating.
• Experience supporting deterministic log replay for downstream evaluation, including log schema design, provenance and versioning of recorded data, and matching recorded sensor timing to offline ground truth such as RTK GNSS post-processing.

Conditions

The US salary range is $163,500 to $228,500 USD. This is an estimate for base salary only. Actual pay may depend on experience, education or training, critical skills and business considerations.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.

Benefits

• Equity grants, which the company describes as highly competitive, count toward total compensation.