Mission Autonomy - Planning and Behaviors Manager

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 You:

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 autonomous systems. 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.

• 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.

• 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.
• Airborne contingency and emergency management.
• Machine learning for complex decision making and behavior generation.
• Years of 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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 featuring a rotating menu of delicious options, an assortment of snacks to keep you fueled throughout the day, and a selection of beverages, including coffee, tea, and other drinks, to keep…