Senior Platform Engineer

Location: Torrance, California, United States

Department: Autonomy

Who we are

Neros is a defense technology company rebuilding America’s drone industrial base. We design and manufacture high-performance unmanned systems that are tested in combat, iterated at startup speed, and built at massive scale. Our team culture is fast, hands-on, and obsessed with closing the gap between design and deployment.

As drones transform the character of warfare, Neros is delivering the systems the West needs to compete on the modern battlefield and deter the adversaries of democracy. We’re hiring engineers, operators, and builders who want to move fast, take on extreme ownership, and get capability into the hands of warfighters in months, not years.

What you will be doing

The Senior Platform Engineer builds the onboard software platform on which all Neros autonomy software runs. Working within the Autonomy Platform & Runtime team, this role is responsible hands-on for runtime and middleware integration, real-time scheduling and latency accounting, high-rate on-vehicle logging, hardware time-stamping and time synchronization, and the layer that delivers imagery and inertial data into the autonomy stack.

Responsibilities 

• Implement and maintain the autonomy runtime and middleware integration layer, including module interfaces, process and thread structure, message passing and execution rates, that all other autonomy software is developed against
• Own real-time scheduling, latency accounting and deadline monitoring on target hardware, including end-to-end sensor-to-actuator latency measurement under sustained thermal load, and deliver the instrumentation required for latency to be enforced as a release gate
• Design and implement high-rate on-vehicle logging, including ring buffer and triggered capture, multi-sensor and video streams, storage and bandwidth budgeting, and log integrity verification, without degrading control loop timing
• Implement hardware time-stamping and time synchronization across sensors, mission compute and flight controller, and ensure clock domains and synchronization state are represented in logged data such that flight logs support deterministic replay
• Support hardware-in-the-loop bench infrastructure and field test operations, including on-site flight test support, and resolve platform-level timing, logging and integration defects identified in flight data

You should have the following

• 5+ years of professional experience developing production embedded, robotics or real-time software, with a track record of individual technical delivery on systems that operate outside a laboratory
• Demonstrated delivery of software onto a physical vehicle or embedded platform, such as unmanned aircraft, ground or aerial robotics, autonomous vehicles, automotive or aerospace systems, including responsibility through bring-up, integration and field operation rather than simulation or research alone
• Expert proficiency in modern C++ on embedded Linux, and working proficiency in Python for tooling, analysis and automation, developed under real-time and resource-constrained requirements
• Hands-on development within a robotics or vehicle software runtime or middleware layer, covering inter-process communication and message passing, module interface definition, process and thread structure, and execution scheduling, using ROS 2, DDS, Zenoh, LCM, or a proprietary equivalent
• Depth in real-time systems engineering, including scheduling policies and priorities, CPU affinity and isolation, lock-free or zero-copy data paths, jitter and deadline analysis, and measurement of end-to-end latency distributions on target hardware rather than in simulation
• Experience building high-rate on-vehicle data logging, including ring buffer and triggered capture, multi-sensor and video streams, storage and bandwidth budgeting, and log integrity, delivered without degrading control loop timing
• Experience implementing time synchronization and hardware timestamping across sensors, compute and a flight or vehicle controller, using PTP or gPTP, PPS, sensor trigger lines, or equivalent, and reconciling multiple clock domains in logged data
• Experience developing and debugging sensor drivers and data paths for cameras and inertial sensors, including interfaces such as MIPI CSI-2, GMSL, USB3 Vision, GigE Vision, SPI or I2C, and management of calibration data alongside the sensor streams it applies to

Nice to have

• Unmanned aircraft experience specifically, including integration between an onboard mission computer and a flight controller or autopilot using PX4, ArduPilot and MAVLink or a proprietary equivalent, and familiarity with arming logic, flight modes and failsafe behavior at that boundary
• Experience with thermal or other non-visible imaging payloads, including sensor selection support, driver bring-up, and the calibration and data-handling differences relative to visible-spectrum cameras
• Design or build of hardware-in-the-loop benches, including sensor simulation and injection, hardware timestamp instrumentation, and integration of a HIL bench into automated release gating
• Experience supporting deterministic log replay for downstream evaluation, including log schema design, provenance and versioning of recorded data, and reconciling recorded sensor timing with offline ground truth such as RTK GNSS post-processing

US Salary Range

$163,500 – $228,500 USD

The salary range for this role is an estimate based on a wide range of compensation factors, inclusive of base salary only. Actual salary may vary based on (but not limited to) work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Highly competitive equity grants are considered part of Neros' total compensation package.

We’re an equal opportunity employer. We welcome all applicants without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.