Autonomy Software Engineer

About You & the Role

Own the flight-critical runtime that keeps Zipline aircraft in a known safe state—no matter what the world throws at them. You’ll architect and ship the autonomy safety layer that orchestrates missions, detects/diagnoses faults, and executes mitigation and recovery across planning, perception, and controls. This is deep systems work in Rust/C++ with tight real-time constraints: you’ll make high-judgment design decisions, prove them in SIL/HIL and flight logs, and raise the bar on reliability for a global, safety-critical fleet.

What You’ll Do

• Design the mission/flight manager: build the state machines and orchestration logic that govern mission sequencing, safe-state transitions, and behavior gating under latency and resource constraints.

• Own fault management end-to-end: implement detection, isolation, mitigation, and recovery (FIMR) for sensors, compute, comms, power, and actuation; ensure graceful degradation and continuity of service.

• Ship flight-critical Rust/C++: develop and maintain core onboard components with strong observability (health, logs, metrics) and testability (deterministic replay, assertions, invariants).

• Prove safety before flight: define success criteria and build the tooling—scenario libraries, SIL/HIL, log-replay harnesses, fault-injection—to validate behaviors across edge cases and long-tail conditions.

• Integrate across autonomy: partner with planning, perception, and controls to set interfaces, hazards/assumptions, and escalation paths; codify contracts that the runtime enforces.

• Close the loop with operations: turn fleet telemetry and incident reviews into requirements and fixes; drive MTBF/MTTR improvements and intervention-rate reductions.

• Lead with systems judgment: write design docs, perform hazard analysis (e.g., FMEA/STPA-style), run design/PR reviews, and mentor engineers on deep-stack ownership.

What You’ll Bring

• 8+ years building production software for robotics, aerospace, AV, or other safety-critical embedded systems.

• Expert in Rust and/or C++ (C as a plus) for real-time, fault-tolerant applications on embedded Linux/RTOS.

• Demonstrated systems thinking: clear interface design, resource budgeting, and trade-offs under timing/safety/power constraints.

• Hands-on with SIL/HIL, scenario validation, log replay, and fault injection<