Staff Software Integration Engineer

About the company

Merlin Labs

Computer software · 51 to 200 employees

What you'll do

• 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.

What you need

• 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 synchronization, and reliable startup and shutdown.
• Deep familiarity with Linux host and embedded systems, including services, permissions, networking, software builds, deployment, and system-level diagnostics.
• Experience integrating avionics or comparable hardware interfaces, including ARINC 429, and the ability to interpret and implement interface control documents.
• Experience developing binary serializers and parsers, with attention to byte order, framing, validation, malformed inputs, and protocol compatibility.
• Strong understanding of UDP/TCP networking and asynchronous data pipelines, including buffering, packet loss, ordering, backpressure, and connection management.
• Experience with embedded Linux cross-compilation and deployment using vendor SDKs and build systems such as CMake.
• Proficiency in Python for engineering tools, test automation, and data-processing workflows.
• Experience developing Rust services, or substantial experience with asynchronous systems programming and the ability to become productive in Rust.
• Experience with automated testing, continuous integration, Git-based version control and code review, and Jira or comparable issue tracking.
• Demonstrated ability to own an end-to-end system, lead technical decisions, and troubleshoot directly with physical hardware.
• Ability to work regularly onsite in our Boston lab to integrate and troubleshoot equipment.

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