Autonomy & Embedded Systems Engineer for UxS

Red Cat Holdings; Salt Lake City (UT); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Red Cat Holdings’ SPiDRWORX Advanced Product Development & Integration team seeks an Embedded Systems & Autonomy Engineer to develop multi-domain unmanned systems across air, ground, and maritime environments. You’ll bring up hardware, develop firmware, and integrate autonomy software for defense customers.

You will collaborate with electrical, mechanical, RF/datalink, and software engineers, debug complex hardware/software interactions, and help transition concepts to fielded products with

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent practical experience.
• 2+ years of embedded development on physical hardware.
• Strong C/C++ programming skills.
• Experience with ARM Cortex-M/STM32 microcontrollers and RTOS like FreeRTOS, ChibiOS, or NuttX.
• Experience with embedded interfaces: I2C, SPI, UART, CAN, Ethernet.
• Ability to read schematics and debug with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and JTAG/SWD tools.
• Git and Linux-based development proficiency.
• Ability to obtain U.S. government security clearance.
• Experience with autonomy, robotics, or navigation software.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate microcontrollers, compute platforms, sensors, autopilots, software frameworks, and partner technologies through hands-on testing and rapid prototyping.
• Build proof-of-concept integrations to validate new capabilities and customer requirements before full development.
• Support architecture and trade studies considering compute performance, latency, size, weight, power, cost, software maturity, and integration risk.
• Develop and maintain C/C++ firmware for vehicle controllers, payload electronics, motor-control interfaces, and custom embedded boards.
• Work in bare-metal and RTOS environments on microcontrollers such as ARM Cortex-M/STM32.
• Bring up new hardware, including power and clock validation, boot configuration, peripheral setup, communications interfaces, and low-level drivers.
• Develop and integrate drivers for sensors and peripherals such as IMUs, GNSS/INS, cameras, gimbals, rangefinders, radar, and LiDAR.
• Configure, modify, and extend vehicle-control software such as Betaflight, ArduPilot, and PX4 for FPV, multirotor, fixed-wing, ground, and maritime platforms.
• Integrate embedded Linux computers, including NVIDIA Jetson and similar edge-compute platforms, with vehicle controllers, cameras, sensors, payloads, and autonomy applications.
• Develop system interfaces using MAVLink, ROS 2, DroneCAN, uORB, or custom messaging and APIs.
• Integrate autonomy stacks and behavior-execution frameworks with vehicle controllers and onboard compute.
• Build and maintain simulation and hardware-in-the-loop environments to develop, regression-test, and verify autonomy behaviors before field deployment.
• Analyze flight/mission logs to diagnose autonomy failures, tune behavior parameters, and drive continuous improvement of planning and decision-making software.

Skills

Embedded systems

C/C++ programming

RTOS experience

Git

Linux development

Hardware debugging

Embedded interfaces (I2C/SPI/UART/CAN/

ARM Cortex-M/STM32

Autonomy/ robotics software exposure

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or related field

Tools

FreeRTOS

ChibiOS

NuttX

Git

Linux

JTAG/SWD tools

I2C

SPI

UART

CAN

Ethernet

Job description

Red Cat Holdings’ SPiDRWORX Advanced Product Development & Integration team seeks an Embedded Systems & Autonomy Engineer to develop multi-domain unmanned systems across air, ground, and maritime environments. You’ll bring up hardware, develop firmware, and integrate autonomy software for defense customers.

You will collaborate with electrical, mechanical, RF/datalink, and software engineers, debug complex hardware/software interactions, and help transition concepts to fielded products with