Autonomy Integration Engineer (Drone Stack)

About the role

Applied Intuition, Inc. is powering the future of physical AI. Founded in 2017 and now valued at $15 billion, the Silicon Valley company is creating the digital infrastructure needed to bring intelligence to every moving machine on the planet. Applied Intuition services the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining and agriculture industries in three core areas: tools and infrastructure, operating systems, and autonomy. Eighteen of the top 20 global automakers, as well as the United States military and its allies, trust the company’s solutions to deliver physical intelligence. Applied Intuition is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Washington, D.C.; San Diego; Ft. Walton Beach, Florida; Ann Arbor, Michigan; London; Stuttgart; Munich; Stockholm; Bangalore; Seoul; and Tokyo. Learn more at applied.co http://applied.co.

We are an in-office company, and our expectation is that full-time employees primarily work from their Applied Intuition office 5 days a week. However, we also recognize the importance of flexibility and trust our employees to manage their schedules responsibly. This may include occasional remote work, starting the day with morning meetings from home before heading to the office, or leaving earlier when needed to accommodate family commitments. This in-office expectation does not apply to contractor positions

ABOUT THE ROLE

As an Autonomy Integration Engineer within our Drone Stack team at Applied Intuition, you will serve as the technical anchor bridging hardware, edge software, and field flight operations. Split roughly 50/50 between the lab and the airfield, you will be responsible for bringing autonomous aerial systems from initial benchtop configuration to live operational flight.

In this role, you will configure embedded Linux environments, deploy and validate containerized software stacks, wire up mesh network topologies, and write key middleware glue code to keep subsystems communicating seamlessly. You are as comfortable with a soldering iron and oscilloscope at the bench as you are SSH-ing into an onboard computer over a mesh radio under field conditions.

This opportunity can also be located at our Drone Lab near Fort Walton Beach, Florida or HQ in Sunnyvale, CA (relocation offered).

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Lead System Bring-Up: Drive end-to-end hardware and software integration for unmanned aerial systems, moving platforms from benchtop prototyping to active flight test campaigns.

- Deploy & Configure Edge Software: Manage, configure, and deploy software stacks using Docker images, shell scripts, and Linux system tools across onboard computes and peripheral hardware.

- Field & Bench Troubleshooting: Troubleshoot vehicle networks, payload interfaces, and sensor links in real time using command-line tools (grep, less, journalctl, nano/vim) and hardware diagnostics (multimeters, oscilloscopes).

- Build Test Tooling & Glue Code: Develop Python and C++ scripts for data reduction, log analysis, system validation, and real-time subsystem verification.