Embedded Linux / Edge Autonomy Engineer

📋 Description

• • Noda AI Inc. is seeking a highly skilled and execution-oriented Embedded Linux / Edge Autonomy Engineer to join our innovative team in Austin, TX. This hybrid role is pivotal in bringing up, hardening, and integrating cutting-edge edge-resident autonomy capabilities onto real-world hardware, ensuring seamless operation within our broader autonomous orchestration platform. You will be at the forefront of making advanced autonomy functional outside of controlled lab environments, specifically on Linux-based edge compute systems that operate under challenging conditions such as degraded communications, constrained resources, and heterogeneous vendor landscapes.
• • This position demands a deep understanding of the intersection between embedded systems, operating systems, networking, and autonomy software. Your primary focus will be on ensuring that autonomy software exhibits deterministic, observable, and field-ready behavior. You will gain invaluable hands-on experience with both Edge AI and supervisory autonomy running adjacent to unmanned vehicles, as well as with platform-level autonomous orchestration and AI systems that coordinate complex behaviors across fleets and multiple domains. This is a hands-on role for engineers who thrive on debugging complex real-world systems, meticulously measuring performance, and ensuring operational success under pressure.
• • Key responsibilities include the design and implementation of offline-first supervisory behaviors. This involves developing robust solutions for connected, disconnected, and rejoin scenarios, incorporating essential features like store-and-forward telemetry and deterministic safe-state escalation. You will be responsible for bringing up and rigorously validating autonomy software on actual edge compute hardware running Linux, ensuring it meets stringent performance and reliability standards.
• • A significant part of your role will involve integrating autonomy components with live telemetry and command interfaces, utilizing standard industry protocols. You will be tasked with measuring and profiling critical system metrics such as CPU utilization, memory usage, I/O behavior, and end-to-end latency. This analysis will be conducted under both nominal and degraded operational conditions to identify potential bottlenecks and areas for optimization.
• • You will implement and validate event-driven, deterministic logic designed to supervise autonomous behavior. This logic will be based on real-time communications status and overall system health, ensuring that the system can react appropriately to changing conditions. Diagnosing and debugging complex issues related to networking degradation, including packet loss, timing jitter, and heartbeat gaps, will be a core function.
• • To ensure transparency and traceability, you will instrument systems for enhanced observability and explainability. This means ensuring that all system behavior is meticulously traceable through comprehensive logs and telemetry data. You will also leverage hardware debugging tools, such as multimeters, oscilloscopes, and logic analyzers, to troubleshoot intricate power, signal, and I/O issues at the hardware level.
• • While simulation-in-the-loop testing will be supported where beneficial, your primary focus will remain on validation using real hardware. You will collaborate closely with a multidisciplinary team, including autonomy engineers, platform engineers, mission leads, and field operations personnel, to guarantee that systems behave predictably and reliably during critical demonstrations and deployments.
• • A crucial aspect of this role involves rapidly troubleshooting and stabilizing systems during high-stakes field tests and customer-facing events. You will take ownership of health modeling and watchdog patterns, including heartbeat mechanisms, staleness detection, escalation procedures, and safe-state implementation for vehicle supervisors, ensuring the utmost reliability and safety.
• • This role offers a unique opportunity to work on transformative technology in the defense, intelligence, and commercial sectors, contributing to the advancement of autonomous systems. You will be part of a veteran-owned, venture-backed company that is building the future of unmanned system collaboration.