Autonomy Platform & Runtime Lead

Neros is a defense technology company rebuilding America’s drone industrial base. We design and manufacture high-performance unmanned systems that are tested in combat, iterated at startup speed, and built at massive scale. Our team culture is fast, hands-on, and obsessed with closing the gap between design and deployment.

As drones transform the character of warfare, Neros is delivering the systems the West needs to compete on the modern battlefield and deter the adversaries of democracy. We’re hiring engineers, operators, and builders who want to move fast, take on extreme ownership, and get capability into the hands of warfighters in months, not years.

What you will be doing

The Autonomy Platform Lead owns the onboard software platform on which all Neros autonomy software runs, spanning the runtime architecture and module interfaces, real time scheduling and latency accounting, on vehicle logging and time synchronization, and the build, release and deployment path onto the aircraft. This role leads a small platform engineering team while contributing directly to the software, and is accountable for maintaining a single configurable runtime across all Neros unmanned aircraft rather than per program forks.

The Autonomy Platform Lead additionally represents autonomy in hardware co-design, carrying the compute, power, thermal and mass requirements of the autonomy payload into bill of materials decisions, and owns deployment of the autonomy software stack onto the selected embedded compute.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture, roadmap and delivery of the autonomy runtime, including the module interface contract, process and thread model, message passing, execution rates and latency guarantees that every other autonomy group develops against
• Maintain a single autonomy runtime across all vehicle platforms through a platform configuration layer, such that a new airframe revision is delivered as a configuration change rather than a software fork, and enforce that boundary against per program divergence
• Own real time scheduling, latency accounting and deadline monitoring, including end to end sensor to actuator measurement on flight hardware under sustained thermal load, and deliver the instrumentation required for latency to be enforced as a release gate
• Own build, release, versioning and deployment of autonomy software to bench and field vehicles, the autonomy continuous integration infrastructure jointly with the evaluation organization, and on vehicle logging and hardware time-stamping, including full rate capture with triggered dump, time synchronization across sensor, compute and flight controller, and log integrity, without degrading control loop performance
• Own the representation of autonomy in hardware co-design and bill of materials decisions by quantifying compute, power, thermal and mass requirements against measured latency budgets, and own deployment of learned components to the selected embedded accelerator, including quantization and characterization of the resulting accuracy and latency trade off
• Lead and grow the platform engineering team through hiring, mentorship and technical review, while continuing to contribute directly to the codebase as an engineer

You should have the following

• 5+ years of professional experience developing production embedded, robotics or real time software, including 2+ years leading an engineering team or a technical program as a tech lead or engineering manager, with continued hands on technical contribution throughout
• Demonstrated delivery of software onto a physical vehicle or embedded platform operating outside a laboratory, such as unmanned aircraft, ground or aerial robotics, autonomous vehicles, automotive or aerospace systems, including…