Senior Aviation Cyber Certification Engineer

Boston or Remote Engineering – Airworthiness & Certification /Full Time /Hybrid 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 have hands-on experience navigating airworthiness security certification on a civil aviation program. You understand how DO-326A/ED-202A, ARP
4754B, and DO-356A/ED-203A apply to certification programs, and you've built or contributed to a Plan for Security Aspects of Certification (PSecAC) or equivalent artifact where no process existed before. You know how to show compliance to applicable requirements for FAA/EASA or a Designated Engineering Representative (DER) approval.

Merlin Labs builds autonomous aviation systems for demanding defense customers, and we are establishing the civil side of our aviation cyber certification capability as our program portfolio grows. This is a foundational role: you will build the processes, procedures, and documentation that carry Merlin's civil aviation cyber certification work, working with minimal supervision and closely with our Information Systems Security team on the military airworthiness side.

If you have a builder's, 0-to-1 mentality and want to own how Merlin approaches aviation cybersecurity certification, this is the role.

Responsibilities:

Establish civil aviation cyber certification discipline: define the processes, procedures, templates, and artifact structure needed to support airworthiness security certification as civil aviation programs come online.

Lead airworthiness security activities aligned to DO-326A/ED-202A and ARP
4754B, including threat and security risk identification, and develop the Plan for Security Aspects of Certification (PSecAC), supporting Security Development Plan, and PSecAC Summary.

Perform aircraft, system, and item-level security risk assessments per DO-356A/ED-203A, and develop the certification evidence — security risk assessments, verification results, and compliance data — required to support the security aspects of certification.

Serve as technical point of contact with the FAA (and other applicable certification authorities or their designated representatives) on cybersecurity certification deliverables and activities for civil aviation programs.

Partners with systems, software, and safety engineering teams to embed airworthiness security requirements into design and development early, and coordinate security certification activities with the broader certification schedule.

Own the security certification documentation set — security plans, risk assessments, compliance matrices, and means-of-compliance packages — and maintain configuration control as programs move through certification milestones.

Validate and build on the aviation cyber certification-related work already performed by the Lead Engineer, Information Systems Security — including authorization artifacts such as test reports supporting military…