Situational Awareness Lead

About Merlin: 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.
About YouYou are an experienced engineer with a background in autonomous systems, aviation, and robotics who wants to lead Merlin’s direction when it comes to perception and situational awareness. 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’re comfortable working across multiple sensing modalities, know how to turn raw data into structured representations that enable intelligent behavior, and can define how autonomous aircraft understand their environment. 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.

Responsibilities

• Drive the technical direction and deliver capabilities supporting perception and situational awareness for airborne autonomy systems.
• Define the research, experiments, and development projects to deliver situational awareness for mission autonomy using diverse sensors, fusion algorithms, and world model representations.
• Identify gaps and define staffing needs to develop and deliver perception, world modeling, and situational awareness capabilities.
• Ensure the situational awareness plans align with short term R&D objectives, long term objectives, and the Merlin technology roadmap.
• Lead architecture design and perform architecture and technology trade-off analysis, accounting for short term objectives and long term goals in decision making.
• Step in to a hands-on software development role as needed.
• 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.

Requirements

• Degree in Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, Robotics Engineering, or a related subject.
• Professional experience developing software for airborne autonomous systems.
• Subject matter expert in one or more of the following:
• Sensor modalities including EO/IR cameras, radar, LIDAR, GPS/INS, ADS-B, and more.
• State estimation and Kalman filtering or similar techniques.
• Perception techniques including detection, classification, and automatic target recognition.
• Multi-sensor and multi-modal fusion.
• Alternative PNT for GPS-denied environments.
• World model and common operating picture representations.
• 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.

Desired

• Experience with perception systems for aircraft or other high reliability safety-critical environments.
• 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

• Travel 10-20% of the time to support team meetings, integration events, and flight testing

This position is based on-site at Merlin HQ in Boston, MA. We offer flexible hybrid in office schedules.
We understand that relocating for a new role is a significant decision, and we’re here to support you every step of the way. That’s why we offer comprehensive relocation assistance to help make your transition as seamless as possible. From covering moving expenses to providing guidance on finding housing, we aim to ensure your relocation experience is stress-free.
Additionally, once you’re here, you’ll enjoy a variety of on-site perks designed to make your workday enjoyable and convenient. These include catered lunches feat