Director, Features System Engineering

Merlin (NASDAQ: MRLN) is a publicly traded aerospace and defense company building a non-human pilot to deliver full-stack autonomy for any aircraft from takeoff to touchdown. The Merlin Pilot autonomy system powers a growing range of aircraft and mission profiles and has been proven through hundreds of autonomous flights from Merlin's global flight test facilities, including Kerikeri, New Zealand; Smithfield, Rhode Island; and soon, Bedford, Massachusetts. Headquartered in Boston, Merlin is expanding its organization to accelerate the development and deployment of its autonomy platform, helping customers solve some of aviation's most pressing challenges, from pilot shortages to improving flight safety. Backed by some of the world's leading investors prior to its public listing, Merlin continues to advance the certification and commercialization of autonomous flight across commercial and defense aviation. 

You are a systems engineering Technology leader who has built and run the function strategically, not just practiced it. You have partnered with business and product teams to lead the system and sub-system expectations, requirements, and verification strategy on new product development programs, and you know how to turn an ambiguous concept into a defined, testable, certifiable system. You have defined the behaviors and functions of autonomous, AI-enabled systems, ideally in Product Architecture, Mission Autonomy, Vehicle Autonomy, and you can coach,explain and drive the design intent and the safety case to engineers, executives, customers, suppliers, and regulators with equal credibility.

 

You have worked as part of an engineering and technology organization on safety-critical systems, so you know how to keep safety and human factors at the forefront while the schedule is pushing hard. You set the systems engineering plans, processes, and standards that let a small, fast-moving team execute without losing rigor, and you stay close enough to the work to own significant architecture, requirements, and interface decisions yourself. You align hardware, software, safety, and flight controls around a shared technical picture, and you hold the line when disciplines disagree.

 

You build and develop managers and engineers as readily as you build architectures. You hire strong systems talent, mentor them into technical

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📋 Preparation Priorities (Key Areas to Clarify):

• 1. Moving fast and breaking things in a domain where software failure results in catastrophic loss.
• 2. Hand-waving edge cases in flight autonomy and sensor fusion logic.
• 3. Inability to operate effectively under strict aviation regulatory frameworks.

✨ Recommended Role Alignment Hook:

I engineer certified, safety-critical autonomy stacks that bridge the gap between rigorous aviation standards and scalable unmanned flight.