The posting, in Merlin Labs's own words
archived Oct 7, 2026About Merlin:
Merlin (NASDAQ: MRLN) is a publicly traded aerospace and defense company building a non-human pilot to deliver full-stack autonomy for any aircraft from takeoff to touchdown. The Merlin Pilot autonomy system powers a growing range of aircraft and mission profiles and has been proven through hundreds of autonomous flights from Merlin's global flight test facilities, including Kerikeri, New Zealand; Smithfield, Rhode Island; and soon, Bedford, Massachusetts. Headquartered in Boston, Merlin is expanding its organization to accelerate the development and deployment of its autonomy platform, helping customers solve some of aviation's most pressing challenges, from pilot shortages to improving flight safety. Backed by some of the world's leading investors prior to its public listing, Merlin continues to advance the certification and commercialization of autonomous flight across commercial and defense aviation.
About you:
You are an experienced engineer with a background in autonomous systems, aviation, or robotics who is motivated to build software that enables effective human-machine and machine-machine teaming. You’re excited to enhance how humans interact with complex automated systems. You are comfortable with either leading technical projects or contributing independently to software development and experimentation. You take pride in writing high-quality, maintainable code, and are driven to improve interactive teaming behaviors through human subject testing and integration into real airborne systems.
Read the full posting ↓
Responsibilities:
Contribute to the technical direction and implementation of capabilities supporting human-machine and machine-machine teaming for autonomous airborne systems. Design, develop, and deploy novel teaming capabilities that measurably enhance the performance, safety, and resilience of human-machine teams. Propose, design, and execute applied research and human subject experiments to evaluate human-machine teaming capabilities in realistic operations. Contribute to simulation, integration, and flight test activities to validate autonomy software in relevant environments. Write, test, document and review code according to Merlin’s development standards. 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 (including graduate work) developing software for airborne autonomous systems.
Deep experience in one or more of the following:
Human-machine interaction for crewed aircraft and/or UAS Single- and multi-vehicle autonomy, resource allocation, and decision making algorithms Software development for physiological signal monitoring Algorithmic modeling for human cognitive state analysis Experience 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. Experience with Linux and open-source development tools. Proficiency writing code in Python. Experience with technical writing. Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to learn and contribute across different technical domains.
Nice to Have:
Proficiency with C++ and ROS . Experience designing focused research plans and experiments to evaluate human-machine and machine-machine teaming effectiveness. Experience with perception systems, sensor fusion, world modeling concepts, or Bayesian probabilistic methods. Experience with proposal writing and technical roadmap development. Familiarity with simulation software, especially aircraft simulation. Experience with hardware and software integration and debugging. Experience with flight testing (uncrewed or crewed aircraft). Pilot license and flight experience is a plus.