Software Integration Engineer

Position: Staff Software Integration Engineer
Boston Engineering – Virtual Test Environment /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 are a hands-on systems software engineer who takes ownership of complex software and hardware integration efforts, from architecture through deployment and operation. You write disciplined, maintainable code and troubleshoot methodically across real-time applications, Linux hosts, networks, and physical equipment. You work independently, collaborate across engineering disciplines, and help other engineers build on what you deliver.

As part of Merlin’s Virtual Test Environments (VTE) team, you will own software connecting aircraft avionics, hardware-in-the-loop test environments, simulation models, and flight-test data systems. Your work will enable engineers to exercise aircraft systems before flight, observe their behavior, and capture and replay data to investigate issues.

Responsibilities:

Own the architecture, development, and sustainment of real-time I/O software and telemetry infrastructure supporting aircraft integration benches and simulation environments.

Develop modern C++ software on embedded Linux targets to interface with avionics hardware, manage periodic execution and watchdogs, and integrate generated aircraft simulation models.

Develop and maintain hardware abstraction layers using UEI PowerDNA equipment, vendor SDKs, low-level I/O APIs, and device drivers.

Integrate ARINC 429, CAN, serial, and discrete I/O using aircraft interface control documents; validate message encoding, signal mapping, update rates, and error handling.

Develop and maintain asynchronous Rust services that ingest multiple telemetry sources, synchronize and order samples, and stream data to flight-test displays and recording systems.

Implement robust binary protocols and network interfaces using UDP, TCP, and messaging technologies such as ZeroMQ, accounting for packet loss, ordering, buffering, and client liveness.

Build capabilities for timestamp alignment, session recording, data retrieval, and simulation replay that make integration issues reproducible.

Maintain cross-compilation, packaging, and deployment workflows for ARM Linux targets and Linux hosts, including Yocto SDKs, CMake, Debian packages, systemd, Docker, and Docker Compose.

Establish automated verification through unit tests, hardware integration tests, parser fuzzing, and Python-based smoke tests and tooling.

Partner with avionics, aircraft software, flight dynamics, and flight test engineers to reproduce aircraft integration conditions in the lab and resolve issues across software and hardware boundaries.

Qualifications:

Strong proficiency in modern C++, including resource management, concurrency, error handling, and maintainable systems software design.

Experience developing timing-sensitive software on Linux, including fixed-period execution, watchdogs, thread…