Engineering Manager, Autonomy Planning & Behaviors

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Drive the technical direction and deliver autonomous decision making, behavior execution, and motion planning capabilities for airborne systems.
• Define the research, experiments, and development projects that support delivering mission autonomy 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.
• 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.

Job requirements

• 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 and to be a force multiplier for our military.
• You have developed and deployed autonomy for airborne systems, have a deep understanding of the techniques enabling mission management and decision making, and understand how to build and test scalable teams of…
• 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.
• Degree in Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, Robotics Engineering, or a related subject.
• Years of professional experience developing software for airborne autonomous systems.
• Subject matter expert 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.