Autonomy Platform & Runtime Lead
Neros Technologies4 hours ago
Torrance, CA, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$164k - $229k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture, roadmap, and delivery of the autonomy runtime, including module interfaces, process and thread models, message passing, execution rates, and latency guarantees.
- Maintain a single configurable autonomy runtime across vehicle platforms and prevent divergence into program-specific software forks.
- Own real-time scheduling, latency accounting, deadline monitoring, and sensor-to-actuator measurement on flight hardware.
- Own build, release, versioning, deployment, continuous integration, on-vehicle logging, hardware timestamping, and time synchronization for autonomy software.
- Represent autonomy in hardware co-design and bill-of-materials decisions, including compute, power, thermal, memory, and mass requirements.
- Deploy learned components to embedded accelerators, including quantization and accuracy-versus-latency characterization.
- Lead, hire, mentor, and technically review the platform engineering team while contributing directly to software development.
Requirements
- 5+ years of professional experience developing production embedded, robotics, or real-time software.
- 2+ years leading an engineering team or technical program as a tech lead or engineering manager, with continued hands-on technical contribution.
- Demonstrated delivery of software onto a physical vehicle or embedded platform in field operation, including bring-up and integration.
- Expert proficiency in modern C++ on embedded Linux and working proficiency in Python for tooling and automation.
- Experience architecting robotics or vehicle software runtimes or middleware using ROS 2, DDS, Zenoh, LCM, or a proprietary equivalent.
- Deep real-time systems experience, including scheduling, CPU affinity and isolation, lock-free or zero-copy data paths, jitter, deadline analysis, and target-hardware latency measurement.
- Experience implementing time synchronization and hardware timestamping using PTP, gPTP, PPS, sensor trigger lines, or equivalent.
- Experience with embedded build, release, continuous integration, cross-compilation, toolchain management, Yocto, Buildroot, or containerized build environments.
- Experience building high-rate on-vehicle data logging with ring buffers, triggered capture, multi-sensor and video streams, storage and bandwidth budgeting, and log integrity.
- Experience deploying neural networks to embedded accelerators such as NVIDIA Jetson, TensorRT, Qualcomm QNN, SNPE, Texas Instruments TIDL, or Hailo.
- Experience working with hardware and electrical engineering teams on embedded compute payload requirements, system-on-module or carrier-board selection, and bill-of-materials decisions.
- Nice-to-have experience includes unmanned aircraft, PX4, ArduPilot, MAVLink, hardware-in-the-loop benches, sensor simulation, automated release gating, volume manufacturing, factory provisioning, and fleet software updates.
Benefits
- US base salary range of $163,500–$228,500, with highly competitive equity grants considered part of total compensation.
- The role is at Neros, a defense technology company building and deploying unmanned systems; no specific remote or office arrangement is stated.
About Neros Technologies
Neros Technologies designs and manufactures high-performance unmanned systems—air vehicles, autonomy software, and related strike and sensing payloads—for U.S. and allied defense customers. The privately held company, founded in 2023 and headquartered in Los Angeles, focuses on combat-tested drones built and iterated at scale to close the gap between design and deployment. Its work spans GPS-denied navigation, state estimation, guidance, and manufacturing to help rebuild the U.S. drone industrial base.