Senior Vice President of Engineering

Senior Vice President Of Engineering

Merlin is a venture backed aerospace startup building a non-human pilot to enable both reduced crew and uncrewed flight. Backed by some of the world's leading investors, Merlin is scaling alongside our customers to begin leveraging autonomy today to solve some of aviation's biggest challenges.

Merlin is developing the world's most intelligent autonomous pilot, built to operate safely and effectively across a range of platformsfrom small uncrewed systems to transport-category aircraft. We're looking for a Vice President of Engineering to lead the technical development and delivery of our autonomy core product. This senior leader will be accountable for engineering execution, team performance, and delivery of the Merlin Pilot in alignment with our product roadmap, certification strategy, and customer commitments. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who thrives at the intersection of systems thinking, team execution, and product delivery. You'll lead and grow a high-performance team across multiple engineering disciplines, working closely with the CTO and Chief Product Officer to ensure the Merlin Pilot is high performing, safe, modular, and ready for real-world operations.

You are a seasoned engineering leader with a strong background in autonomous system development, especially in aviation or adjacent safety-critical domains. You understand the technical nuance of flight autonomyfrom low-level control through to mission behaviorand how to bring these capabilities to life in software, hardware, and systems. You've built and scaled engineering teams, delivered complex integrated products, and know how to balance technical depth with cross-functional leadership. Flight experience is a plus, but your primary superpower is execution.

Responsibilities :

• Lead the end-to-end engineering execution of the Merlin Pilot product, manage, and grow a cross-functional organization that includes :
• Systems Engineering translating capability needs into clear, actionable requirements and architectures.
• Autonomy Software developing and integrating flight, mission, and future campaign-level autonomy logic and behaviors.
• Compute Platform Integration porting and validating autonomy software on certifiable OS and hardware platforms.
• Custom Hardware Engineering overseeing development of specialized components not available commercially.
• Modeling & Simulation advancing a world-class simulation environment to accelerate autonomy development and validation.
• Cloud Infrastructure enabling scalable test and training environments using modern cloud-native tools.
• Ensure the autonomy stack meets performance, safety, and certification goals across diverse aircraft and use cases.
• Drive rigorous product development practicesversion control, continuous integration, simulation-in-the-loop testing, and traceable verification.
• Collaborate closely with the CTO and Chief Architect to ensure architectural alignment, scalability, and reuse across platforms.
• Interface with the Chief Product Officer to prioritize capabilities and features against the strategic roadmap.
• Build and sustain a high-performance, safety-first engineering culture that balances innovation with discipline.
• Represent engineering execution in internal reviews, customer meetings, and regulatory discussions as needed.

Requirements :