Director, Compute Platform

About Merlin

Merlin is a venture backed aerospace startup building a non-human pilot to enable both reduced crew and uncrewed flight. Backed by some of the world’s leading investors, Merlin is scaling alongside our customers to begin leveraging autonomy today to solve some of aviation’s biggest challenges.

About You

You are a senior platform leader who understands that autonomous flight demands uncompromising reliability, real-time performance, and scalable infrastructure.

You have built and owned compute platforms that power complex, mission-critical systems — spanning cloud ML training, high-fidelity simulation, and edge or embedded environments. You think holistically about architecture, balancing determinism, latency, scalability, safety, and cost.

You are not looking to maintain infrastructure — you want to define it. You operate as a technical authority, partnering closely with autonomy, perception, controls, and flight software leaders to ensure the compute foundation enables rapid development and safe, scalable deployment.

You thrive in environments where the platform you design directly impacts real-world performance. You are comfortable setting long-term technical direction while remaining hands-on in the most complex systems challenges.