Staff Applications Engineer, Tools
About The Position
Archer is an aerospace company based in San Jose, California building an all-electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft with a mission to advance the benefits of sustainable air mobility. We are designing, manufacturing, and operating an all-electric aircraft that can carry four passengers while producing minimal noise. Our sights are set high and our problems are hard, and we believe that diversity in the workplace is what makes us smarter, drives better insights, and will ultimately lift us all to success. We are dedicated to cultivating an equitable and inclusive environment that embraces our differences, and supports and celebrates all of our team members. Our team is seeking a talented and versatile engineer to bridge the gap between our cutting-edge hardware and our software development lifecycle. This isn't a typical DevOps role. You'll be responsible for building the essential tools and automation that allow our software teams to test and validate their code against real, physical systems. You'll work directly with data being sampled from sensors, streamed across networks, and generated by complex hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbeds.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 5+ years of professional software development experience, with a strong emphasis on tooling, automation, or DevOps.
- Expert proficiency in Python, including experience with relevant libraries for I/O, data manipulation (e.g., Pandas, NumPy), and system interaction.
- Demonstrable experience designing, building, and maintaining CI/CD pipelines.
- Proven experience building tools that interface directly with hardware or real-time data streams (e.g., working with data acquisition systems, parsing custom binary protocols, interacting with serial devices).
- A strong foundation in software development best practices, including version control (Git), code reviews, and testing.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with back-end development (e.g., using Flask or Django to build simple APIs or dashboards for displaying test data).
- Familiarity with compiled languages like C/C++ for low-level hardware interaction.
- Experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes).
- Knowledge of hardware communication standards like CAN bus, ARINC-429, or RS-422.
- Previous experience in the aerospace, automotive, robotics, or a similar industry involving complex hardware systems.
- Familiarity with Tool Qualification as guided by DO-330.
Responsibilities
- Develop Hardware Integration Tools: Design, build, and maintain robust Python applications to capture, parse, and analyze real-time data from hardware test setups. This includes interfacing with data streams over serial, CAN, Ethernet (UDP), and other communication protocols.
- Own the CI/CD Pipeline: Architect and manage our automation and CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Teamcity, Jenkins) to integrate hardware testing directly into our software build, test, and deployment processes.
- Maintain and Improve Test Automation Frameworks: Build and support test harnesses and frameworks that allow developers to easily write and execute tests against physical hardware or emulators.
- Enable AI Integration: Support the deployment and integration of LLMs to existing workflows.
- Build for Reliability: Ensure the infrastructure and tooling you create are scalable, reliable, and easy to maintain. Document your work and champion best practices across the engineering organization.
- Collaborate Cross-Functionally: Work closely with hardware engineers, embedded software developers, and integration / lab teams to understand their requirements and build the tools they need to succeed.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Number of Employees
501-1,000 employees
