Drone Autonomy Software Engineer: Flight & Planning

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 199,000 - 292,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity grants

Benefits package

Job summary

DoorDash is seeking a Planning & Controls Engineer to own and develop flight control, motion planning, and mission planning algorithms for drone delivery. This role is hands-on, involving C++ development on embedded platforms, flight testing, and iterative refinement.

You will contribute to the autonomy software stack, tuning fault-tolerant control, and bringing up controllers on new drone platforms while collaborating with a small focused team.

Qualifications

• Deep controls fundamentals including linear/nonlinear systems and stability analysis.
• Experience developing and tuning flight controllers on embedded platforms.
• Experience with state estimation integration and motion planning concepts.

Responsibilities

• Develop and tune low-level flight control algorithms for multirotor and hybrid aircraft on embedded platforms.
• Own dynamics simulation and aerodynamics modeling of the aircraft.
• Build trajectory motion planners for smooth flight and obstacle avoidance; test on hardware.

Skills

C++

Embedded systems

Flight control

Motion planning

State estimation

Dynamics modeling

MPC

Open-source

Education

MS/PhD in EE/ME/CS/Robotics

Tools

PX4

Job description

DoorDash is seeking a Planning & Controls Engineer to own and develop flight control, motion planning, and mission planning algorithms for drone delivery. This role is hands-on, involving C++ development on embedded platforms, flight testing, and iterative refinement.

You will contribute to the autonomy software stack, tuning fault-tolerant control, and bringing up controllers on new drone platforms while collaborating with a small focused team.