Senior Robotics Software Engineer

About Fotokite

Fotokite develops autonomous, high-endurance tethered unmanned aerial systems to help firefighters and public safety teams save lives.

Fotokite systems allow first responders to quickly and easily gain situational awareness after arriving at emergency scenes: our autonomous one-touch launch/land system makes operation simple and safe; the dual color and thermal camera payload provides situational awareness from the system’s aerial perspective; and actively tethered flight means the system can be flown without a certified pilot, and can be left flying for as long as the situation requires.

Summary

This position offers an exciting opportunity to contribute to our evolving robotics software stack including areas such as control, state estimation, and perception. Our robotics software stack is crucial to maintaining stable and safe flight in challenging aerial operational situations, such as high winds, high elevations, and sensor degradation. We are innovating in the space of active tethered drone control, by tightly coupling tether measurements in our state estimation, for improving our estimates and control reliability in the absence of GPS measurements. Active use of cameras and perception techniques to enable a variety of customer-facing applications, such as tracking of moving objects, detection of obstacles, and improving performance in GNSS-denied environments, is another forward-looking dimension for our continued product development. We are looking to strengthen our platform software team with an experienced generalist robotics software engineer who is motivated to develop robust and impactful products through contributions to our wider robotics software stack and system integration activities. 

The Senior Robotics Software Engineer is responsible for designing, implementing, testing, and documenting software and integrating applications for different high-level platform behaviors in our aerial robotics system. This position is also expected to contribute to maintaining and developing the robotics software and systems architecture in our current product and future developments. 

If you are looking for new challenges, in particular, filled with growth and learning opportunities, come and join our dynamic team and be part of our continued success journey in delivering highly performant systems to customers worldwide. 

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Develops and maintains robotics software, including control, state estimation, and perception for our platform varied high-level behaviors including those required for our drone, payloads, and ground station sub-systems
• Develops and maintains product features satisfying customer use cases and requirements
• Performs prototyping and testing of the hardware and software in conjunction with development and maintenance efforts
• Keeps relevant documentation up to date, including preparing new reports 
• Contributes to the overall platform software architecture by advocating for and designing, implementing proper abstraction layers
• Contributes to the overall system architecture through informed selection and testing of sensors, controllers and actuators
• Works independently but in close collaboration with platform HW, SW, and product teams
• Performs other duties as assigned

EDUCATION/QUALIFICATIONS

• Master’s or PhD Degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or other related disciplines
• 5+ years of combined working experience contributing to a full robotics software stack and systems integration including areas of control, state estimation, and perception
• 5+ years of combined working experience developing in C and C++
• Demonstrated experience in writing and testing production-level software for robotic systems, CI/CD, unit/regression testing, hardware in the loop testing, etc. 
• Prior experience with robotics simulation frameworks for development and testing would be a plus
• Prior experience with developing software for drone systems and knowledge of specific dynamics would be a plus
• Prior experience in utilizing third-party robotics libraries for developing product features would be a plus
• Self-driven and collaborative attitude towards getting things done

• Fluency in English is required; any other language is a plus 

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This position description summarizes the main duties of the job. It neither prescribes nor restricts the exact tasks that may be required to carry out these duties. This document should not be construed in any way to represent a contract of employment. Management reserves the right to review and revise this document at any time.