Fleet Software Engineer (Multiple Levels)

About Pyka

Pyka’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, we’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 people’s lives better now and brings the future of electric aviation one step closer each day. 

Role Overview

Pyka is looking for a software engineer to own the path our software takes from the development branch to the fleet. Issues from the field arrive without regard to subsystem boundaries, so you will work across the full aircraft software stack: autonomy, controls, avionics interfaces, and ground systems. You will decide what ships to the fleet and when, own several aircraft software systems directly, and build the testing and release infrastructure the engineering team relies on.
Much of the role is responding to what comes in: reproducing issues from flight logs, isolating them, and either fixing them or handing the subsystem owner a diagnosed problem with a test case attached. The rest is work you scope yourself out of that same pipeline: adding the regression test that would have caught an issue, instrumenting a subsystem so the next occurrence produces usable data, or automating a release step that a person currently does by hand.

Some of the current and future projects you will likely contribute to include:

• Expanding our automated test infrastructure that gates every release, including hardware-in-the-loop tests, simulation-based regression suites, and log replay against real flight data
• Developing tooling to aid in triaging, bug reproduction, and root cause analysis
• Improving our six-week release cadence, including release tooling, versioning, artifact distribution, release notes generation, and staged rollout across a growing fleet
• Maintaining and improving core aircraft software systems such as logging and telemetry, configuration management, health monitoring, and over-the-air software distribution
• Adding observability to parts of the aircraft that are currently difficult to debug after the fact

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

Preferred Qualifications

• 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

Compensation & Benefits

• $144,000–$220,000 salary per year + equity. Compensation will vary depending on location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Salary ranges are subject to change.
• Employer-sponsored health, dental and vision insurance
• FSA with employer matching
• 401(k)
• Paid holidays, generous PTO, and additional unpaid time off
• Voluntary short-term disability, long-term disability, and life insurance
• Pre-tax commuter benefits
• Free catered lunch and plenty of snacks

Export Control Requirements

This position requires access to technology, software and other information that is subject to governmental access control restrictions, due to export controls.  Employment in this position is conditioned on the continued availability of government authorization to authorize release of such items, to the extent required, including without limitation an export license, or other documentation required to establish authorization to receive access to such items. 

Company may delay commencement of employment, rescind an offer of employment, terminate employment, and/or may modify job responsibilities, compensation, benefits, and/or access to Company facilities and information systems, as Company deems appropriate, in order to ensure compliance with applicable government access control restrictions.

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We do not work with external recruiters; if you are an external recruiter, please do not reach out.