Perception Engineer

About You:

• You are an experienced engineer when it comes to all things perception for robotics and autonomous systems who wants to make airplanes that fly themselves. You have hands-on experience and a theoretical background in how to make robots understand the world around them and may have developed technology for autonomous uncrewed vehicles (preferably airborne). You have experience developing software and integrating with complex systems, working with sensors, sensor processing algorithms, and fusion algorithms. You know when to apply traditional algorithms versus machine learning approaches for perception applications, and you want a mix of strategic, design, and implementation work. You are comfortable with and competent at working with a team of senior and junior engineers, can make and justify key decisions to the rest of the team and to stakeholders, and want to drive a team’s technical direction in close collaboration with the tech leads and engineering manager.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and integrate onboard and off-board airborne perception capabilities to enable autonomous flight and decision making.
• Work closely with the R&D software engineering manager to understand team objectives, short term milestones, long term milestones, and technology roadmap.
• Support architecture design and perform architecture and technology trade-off analysis for perception subsystems.
• Drive sensor, integration, and algorithm approaches for perception subsystems.
• Establish and maintain infrastructure and processes to support development, testing, and evaluation of traditional and machine learning based algorithms.
• Collaborate closely with the rest of the R&D software team throughout the research, design, implement, and test cycle.
• Write, test, document and review code according to Merlin’s development standards as needed.
• Collaborate across Merlin to develop novel systems to solve the toughest problems in aviation and autonomy.

Qualifications:

• Degree in Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, Robotics Engineering, or a related subject.
• 5+ years of professional experience developing perception software for physical systems such as aircraft, robotics, or medical devices.
• Subject matter expert the field of perception: detection, processing, and tracking using cameras, radar, LIDAR, and/or other relevant sensor types.
• Experience developing sensor fusion algorithms.
• Experience implementing machine learning based perception and planning algorithms, including using deep learning and reinforcement learning techniques.
• Familiarity with ML frameworks such as Tensorflow, PyTorch, OpenCV.
• Experience with Linux and open-source development tools.
• 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.

Nice to Have:

• Familiarity with the following areas relating to the autonomy software stack:
• Reasoning and decision making.
• Scheduling and motion planning.
• Human-machine interaction.
• System reliability.
• State estimation and control.
• Robotics middleware software such as ROS/2.
• Ability to interpret, develop, and integrate abstract code to facilitate efficiency, modularity, and reusability.
• Understanding and experience developing systems for intrinsic and extrinsic camera calibration.
• 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