SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Poseidon Aerospace is building full-size autonomous cargo aircraft capable of carrying two-ton payloads over 1,000+ nautical miles. The company operates from the San Francisco Bay Area with additional locations in Washington DC, Oregon, and Maine, serving remote communities and contested logistics operations with a new cost curve for air freight.
As Senior Flight Software Engineer, you will own major subsystems of the flight software that runs on the aircraft's flight computers, from architecture through flight test. You will make critical decisions about software structure, failure handling, and testing strategy, while writing a significant portion of the code yourself. You will also mentor other flight software engineers and set the technical bar for the team.
Key responsibilities include:
- Architecting major flight software subsystems with focus on timing, partitioning, and redundancy
- Designing and implementing deterministic, real-time embedded flight software in C++
- Designing fault detection and response systems, including redundancy management, degraded modes, and lost-link behavior
- Defining software requirements and interfaces with avionics, guidance/navigation/control (GNC), and flight test teams, with full traceability to tests
- Implementing GNC algorithms in flight code and verifying against simulation
- Establishing test strategy across unit tests, software-in-the-loop, and hardware-in-the-loop
- Building telemetry, logging, and command paths between aircraft and ground station
- Leading software integration on the aircraft and supporting ground and flight testing, including travel to flight test sites
- Setting coding standards, review practices, and leading design reviews
- Mentoring other flight software engineers
This role offers the opportunity to shape aircraft architecture at a stage where decisions are still yours to make, work directly with flight hardware, and see your code fly a real autonomous cargo aircraft.
REQUIREMENTS:
- B.S. in computer science, engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience)
- 5+ years of professional C or C++ development on embedded, real-time, or safety-critical systems
- Owned a flight software subsystem or equivalent from architecture through fielded operation
- Took software through hardware integration and test on a real vehicle (aircraft, spacecraft, or automotive)
- Designed fault detection and response for a system where failure had safety consequences
- Led design reviews and set technical direction for other engineers
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Flight software experience on crewed or uncrewed aircraft, or spacecraft
- RTOS or bare-metal development with deep understanding of scheduling, timing, and memory
- Experience designing redundant or fault-tolerant flight computer architectures
- Experience developing software under DO-178C or comparable standards (ISO 26262)
- Experience supporting flight test or vehicle test campaigns
- Python for tooling, test automation, and flight data analysis
- Clear technical writing
