Staff Software Integration Engineer
Merlin Labs2 days ago
Boston, MA, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$200k - $265k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture, development, and sustainment of real-time I/O software and telemetry infrastructure for aircraft integration benches and simulation environments.
- Develop modern C++ software on embedded Linux targets, including periodic execution, watchdogs, and integration of generated aircraft simulation models.
- Develop hardware abstraction layers using UEI PowerDNA equipment, vendor SDKs, low-level I/O APIs, and device drivers.
- Integrate ARINC 429, CAN, serial, and discrete I/O while validating message encoding, signal mapping, update rates, and error handling.
- Develop asynchronous Rust services that ingest, synchronize, order, and stream telemetry data to displays and recording systems.
- Implement binary protocols and UDP/TCP network interfaces that handle packet loss, ordering, buffering, and client liveness.
- Build timestamp alignment, session recording, data retrieval, and simulation replay capabilities.
- Maintain cross-compilation, packaging, and deployment workflows for ARM Linux targets and Linux hosts.
- Establish automated verification using unit tests, hardware integration tests, parser fuzzing, and Python-based smoke tests and tooling.
- Partner with avionics, aircraft software, flight dynamics, and flight-test engineers to troubleshoot software and hardware integration issues.
Requirements
- Strong proficiency in modern C++, including resource management, concurrency, error handling, and systems software design.
- Experience developing timing-sensitive software on Linux with fixed-period execution, watchdogs, thread synchronization, and reliable startup and shutdown.
- Deep familiarity with Linux hosts and embedded systems, including services, permissions, networking, builds, deployment, and system diagnostics.
- Experience integrating avionics or comparable hardware interfaces, including ARINC 429, and implementing interface control documents.
- Experience developing binary serializers and parsers with attention to byte order, framing, validation, malformed inputs, and protocol compatibility.
- Strong understanding of UDP/TCP networking and asynchronous data pipelines, including buffering, packet loss, ordering, backpressure, and connection management.
- Experience with embedded Linux cross-compilation and deployment using vendor SDKs and build systems such as CMake.
- Proficiency in Python for engineering tools, test automation, and data-processing workflows.
- Experience developing Rust services or substantial asynchronous systems programming experience with the ability to become productive in Rust.
- Experience with automated testing, continuous integration, Git-based version control, code review, and Jira or comparable issue tracking.
- Demonstrated ability to own an end-to-end system, lead technical decisions, and troubleshoot directly with physical hardware.
- Ability to work regularly onsite in the Boston lab.
- Nice-to-have experience includes UEI PowerDNA or comparable data-acquisition platforms, async Rust with Tokio, channels, serde, and axum, ARINC 429 labels, SDI/SSM, CAN, MIL-STD-1553, RS-232/RS-422, IRIG time, NTP, Curtiss-Wright IADS, Yocto, ARM targets, Debian packaging, systemd, Linux device drivers, flight dynamics, six-degree-of-freedom models, GoogleTest, pytest, GitHub Actions, Docker, S3, REST APIs, JSON schema validation, Cap’n Proto, SQL, GL Studio, React, and HTML5.
- Aviation experience through professional work, flight simulation, or a pilot’s license is a nice-to-have.
Benefits
- Health, dental, and life insurance benefits are offered.
- Flexible paid time off and a 401k with match are offered.
- The role includes onsite catered lunches, snacks, coffee, tea, and other beverages.
- The position is onsite at Merlin headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts.
- The company offers professional development support and a team-focused startup environment.
About Merlin Labs
Merlin Labs builds an aircraft-agnostic autonomy system—Merlin Pilot—that acts as a non-human pilot from takeoff to touchdown for civil and defense operators. The company sells AI-powered flight software and integration services, validated through hundreds of autonomous test flights across multiple aircraft. Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Boston, it is listed on NASDAQ (MRLN) and has secured $100M+ in awarded contracts from military customers.