Fleet Software Engineer (Multiple Levels)

Pyka•Alameda, CA

2d•$144,000 - $205,000

About The Position

Pykaâ€™s goal is to provide society with a new form of safe, clean, and cost-effective transportation enabled by autonomous electric aviation. To get there, weâ€™re taking a different approach than most. We're applying our technologies to every industry where autonomous electric aircraft can be useful, starting with the highest value and most dangerous jobs. In doing so, we're building game-changing products manufactured at scale, while perfecting the safety, reliability, and capabilities of our autonomy engine and electric propulsion systems. We design, develop and manufacture an ecosystem of technologies including proprietary flight control software, avionics, high power density motors, motor controllers, batteries, and custom carbon-fiber composite airframes. Today, we supply autonomous electric aircraft for cargo transport and crop protection to real-world customers across four separate continents and have secured industry-first regulatory approvals from the FAA. Our cargo aircraft enables remote connectivity, enhances express delivery networks, and ensures fast and reliable shipping of critical supplies to areas in need. Our crop protection aircraft offers agricultural services providers and farmers an autonomous tool to make aerial application safer, more precise, and less harmful to surrounding environments. Both vehicles are highly economical to operate, easy to deploy, and significantly reduce CO2 emissions in their respective industries. What you work on at Pyka makes peopleâ€™s lives better now and brings the future of electric aviation one step closer each day.

Requirements

Professional experience with C++ (ideally C++11 or newer): 2+ years for Engineer II, 5+ years for Senior
Professional experience with Python
A track record of debugging difficult problems in systems you did not write, often with incomplete data
Experience with testing infrastructure, CI/CD, release engineering, or build and distribution systems for software that ships to physical devices
Interest in or experience with real-world robotic systems, especially where software interacts with hardware
Comfort working across the stack from low-level systems to user-facing tools
Working knowledge of trigonometry and linear algebra
Willingness to travel occasionally to our California test sites

Responsibilities

Own the release process end-to-end: define what ships, what blocks, and what the bar for "ready to fly" is, and run the cadence on a predictable schedule
Triage and root-cause bugs reported from flight operations, field testing, and customer deployments across the full aircraft stack
Assess severity based on safety and customer impact, and make the call on what gets a hotfix, what goes into the next release, and what is documented and deferred
Fix issues directly when they fall in your area, and hand subsystem owners a diagnosed problem with a test case attached when they do not
Own and maintain several aircraft software subsystems, including their long-term design direction
Design and build testing infrastructure and release management tooling that shortens the time between a change landing and knowing whether it is safe to fly
Run and improve our six-week release cadence
Identify recurring sources of engineering interrupts and address them at the source
Write production-quality code in C++17 and Python, including testing, validation, and support during flight and field testing
Work closely with flight operations to understand what happens in the field and feed that back into engineering