Joby Flight Research designs, develops, and flight-tests novel aircraft using a software-first autonomy approach. We build and deploy autonomy, perception, planning, and radar systems across conventional, electric, and hydrogen-electric aircraft in both CTOL and VTOL configurations.

Joby Flight Research is seeking an Autonomy Staff Robotics Software Engineer, to design and build the AI robotics software for our Superpilot™ autonomy stack. This position offers a unique opportunity to invent and build the algorithms and systems that power Joby’s varied fleet of autonomous aircraft. In this role, you will own, design, and develop solutions for aircraft autonomy involving state estimation, sensor fusion, navigation, perception, and reconstruction.  You will work closely with other software engineers and AI experts in computer vision, machine learning, and robotics. The role requires deep expertise with robotics algorithms, hands-on software engineering, and autonomous systems industry experience.

You will design and develop robust perception and navigation software for autonomous flight.  Further, you will also build software systems for mapping, reconstruction, and advanced sensing with cameras, lidars, and radar. Your work will help teams deploy state-of-the-art AI algorithms and systems for autonomous flight on multiple types of aircraft.

We are a small, high-impact team that values curiosity, technical initiative, and the ability to operate independently. You will collaborate deeply with sensing, controls, and flight software engineers to build a foundation that accelerates our path to safe, autonomous flight. The right candidate is a strong autonomy software engineer who cares deeply about system design, software engineering, and enabling fast, safe iteration across multiple aircraft programs.

Responsibilities 

• Autonomy Robotics Software Development

• Design and implement autonomy algorithms for perception and navigation on autonomous aircraft.
• Design and implement core algorithms for state estimation, sensor fusion, localization, and reconstruction.
• Contribute to software engineering work on the autonomy stack involving integration, analysis, and simulation.

• Autonomy Software Solutions

• Optimize and tune AI perception and navigation algorithms for autonomous aircraft.
• Invent and build advanced sensor modeling and simulation capabilities to support algorithm development, regression testing, and performance evaluation.
• Contribute to autonomy modeling, simulation, and analysis software tooling.

• Autonomy Technical Solutions

• Invent and prototype new methods for mapping and reconstruction in diverse environments.
• Evaluate and analyze advanced sensing and compute solutions for autonomous aircraft involving cameras, lidars, radars and other sensors and compute hardware
• Collaborate closely with the rest of the Superpilot™ team to ideate, plan and execute on high-quality, well-integrated solutions and features.
• Monitor system health and performance, proactively addressing issues and providing user support.

Required 

• Degree in computer science, aerospace engineering, or related field
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering
• Experience in developing software and systems for autonomous vehicles
• Strong proficiency in C++ and python
• Expert knowledge in perception and navigation for autonomous systems including state estimation, sensor fusion and reconstruction
• Deep understanding of computer vision and machine learning methods
• Expertise in signal processing, optimization, statistical inference
• Ability to invent and own technical solutions in autonomy software
• Proven ability to document complex technical designs, architectural trade-offs, and implementation roadmaps
• Champion of software best practices, including rigorous code reviews and mentorship.
• Excellent communication skills for collaborating with cross-functional teams
• This position must meet US export control compliance requirements, therefore a candidate must qualify as a “US Person” as defined by 22 C.F.R. § 120.15. “US Person” includes US Citizens, lawful permanent residents, refugees, or asylees.

Desired 

• Professional software development experience with multi-disciplinary teams in aerospace autonomy
• Expert-level software engineering: deep expertise in architecting and writing clean, scalable, and maintainable code
• Expertise in processing aircraft sensors data such as GPS, inertial, ADS-B, air data, radio data
• Expertise in processing autonomous aircraft sensors such as cameras, lidars, radar
• Experience in ROS2 or related middleware and DDS systems
• Experience writing real-time and safety-critical C++ flight software.