Senior Development Assurance Engineer

About Merlin:

Merlin (NASDAQ: MRLN) is a publicly traded aerospace and defense company building a non-human pilot to deliver full-stack autonomy for any aircraft from takeoff to touchdown. The Merlin Pilot autonomy system powers a growing range of aircraft and mission profiles and has been proven through hundreds of autonomous flights from Merlin's global flight test facilities, including Kerikeri, New Zealand; Quonset Point, Rhode Island; and soon, Bedford, Massachusetts. Headquartered in Boston, Merlin is expanding its organization to accelerate the development and deployment of its autonomy platform, helping customers solve some of aviation's most pressing challenges, from pilot shortages to improving flight safety. Backed by some of the world's leading investors prior to its public listing, Merlin continues to advance the certification and commercialization of autonomous flight across commercial and defense aviation.
About You:
You have more than 7 years of experience applying development assurance discipline for complex integrated avionics systems focused on new and novel technologies in Part 25 aircraft type certification or supplemental type certifications. You know that the development assurance process is the driving factor in the success of these programs. You have personally written, audited, and defended development assurance process documentation with certification authorities. You are comfortable teaching a room of engineers why a process exists, and you have executed these processes under tight timelines. You have experience leading a team of systems engineers from early design concepts to define, validate, and verify certifiable requirements. You have led successful resolution of complex, ambiguous problems with minimal oversight, rallied cross-functional teams around tough challenges on tight schedules, and instinctively look for ways to make processes more efficient and repeatable across multiple programs along the way. In addition to development assurance experience, you are well versed in DO-178C, DO-254, and the systems engineering processes.

Merlin Labs builds autonomous flight systems for civil and defense customers, and future certification programs will carry SAE ARP4754B in their certification basis. We are looking for leaders to own building the process foundation ahead of need. In this role, you will improve Merlin's ARP4754B-compliant development assurance processes, partner with Systems Engineering to mature requirements sets from prototype through full production configurations and help define the path toward a common requirements database that scales across software versions and deployments. Working closely with Merlin's entire technology organization, you will also cross-train into DO-178C and DO-254 compliance processes while teaching and mentoring engineering teams.
You will report into the process assurance organization under the VP of Airworthiness & Certification.
Responsibilities:
●Assess existing processes and tools against ARP4754B to identify gaps and drive improvements.
● Own the refinement, maintenance, and continuous improvement of Development Assurance process
documentation compliant with SAE ARP4754B, scaled to different levels of rigor across program types.
● Partner closely with Merlin's technology organization to advance the following focus areas:
○ Assist Systems Engineering in developing robust requirements sets spanning prototype through
full production configurations.
○ Define the path toward a common requirements database usable across multiple software versions
and aircraft deployments.
○ Cross-train in development assurance compliance for DO-178C and DO-254 to extend audit and
process support beyond the systems level.
○ Assist in standardizing and strengthening Merlin's problem reporting system.
○ Support general Part 25 certification process development.
○ Support and cross train in military airworthiness process improvements aligned with MIL-HDBK-516