DevOps Engineer

Merlin Labs•Boston, MA

21h•Onsite

About The Position

Merlin is a venture-backed aerospace startup building a non-human pilot to enable both reduced crew and uncrewed flight. Backed by some of the world’s leading investors, Merlin is scaling alongside our customers to begin leveraging autonomy today to solve some of aviation’s biggest challenges. This role is for a DevOps engineer who is passionate about CI/CD, automation, and improving build, deployment, and testing processes. The software developed will be deployed onto aircraft, offering a unique challenge beyond typical SaaS platforms. This role does not involve an on-call rotation, ensuring nights and weekends are free.

Requirements

1–3 years of experience in DevOps, Platform Engineering, Site Reliability, or a related role
Strong experience with CI/CD platforms — GitHub Actions preferred; Jenkins, GitLab CI, or CircleCI also acceptable
Experience designing and building test pipelines — writing test jobs, managing test fixtures, interpreting and acting on failures
Solid experience with Linux system administration (Ubuntu preferred)
Proficiency with Docker for building, publishing, and deploying container images
Strong scripting skills in Python and Bash
Comfortable with Git workflows — branching strategies, tagging, release management
Familiarity with artifact repositories — JFrog Artifactory, Nexus, or similar package/container registries
Working experience with AWS (EC2, IAM, S3, ECR) and Microsoft Azure — AWS is our primary cloud for engineering infrastructure; both platforms are part of the day-to-day job
Experience with configuration management tools — Ansible preferred; Chef, Puppet, or similar also acceptable — including managing software and configuration state across physical systems and embedded hardware targets (e.g., bench hardware, flight test aircraft), not just cloud or server infrastructure
Strong problem-solving skills, attention to detail, and ability to work independently
Excellent communication and documentation skills

Nice To Haves

Experience with Debian packaging (dpkg, dch, Launchpad PPAs, or S3-hosted APT repos)
Experience with software products that include a physical systems component — aircraft, robotics, medical devices, autonomous vehicles, or similar
Familiarity with distributed pub/sub frameworks (e.g., ROS2) and underlying middleware such as DDS and Zenoh
Knowledge of networking fundamentals and network security best practices
Experience working in a regulated environment (aerospace, automotive, medical) where traceability and process compliance matter
Experience with government-aligned or compliance-driven cloud environments — Azure Government, GCC High, FedRAMP, or similar
Experience with Infrastructure as Code tools — Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi
Familiarity with security scanning tools — SAST, SCA, SBOM generation, or container scanning
Experience working in GCC High (Microsoft Azure Government Community Cloud) or other FedRAMP/DoD-compliant cloud environments
Familiarity with dev containers and containerized development environments
Familiarity with orchestration techniques for automated regression and simulation-level integration testing (e.g., ReSim or similar frameworks)

Responsibilities

Design, build, and improve CI/CD pipelines across multiple interdependent systems using GitHub Actions, ensuring fast, reliable builds that produce correct artifacts.
Design and maintain test automation frameworks, including smoke tests, integration tests, and deployment validation, for software targeting physical hardware. Drive testing coverage and reliability across unique deployment targets.
Automate software packaging and deployment to test systems, bench hardware, and flight test aircraft using Docker, Debian packaging, Ansible, and JFrog Artifactory.
Maintain and operate JFrog Artifactory repositories, including promotion pipelines, access control, and CLI tooling for downstream consumers.
Collaborate with flight software engineers, test pilots, and IT to ensure tooling and infrastructure support development through flight test. Communicate clearly and document processes to drive adoption.
Identify bottlenecks in the development and release process, propose solutions, and implement them. Contribute to SDLC maturity and DevOps best practices.