Senior Software Engineer

The opportunity

Pterops OS is Synthmind’s onboard execution and assurance foundation for human-supervised autonomous systems. It verifies approved commands, supervises bounded operations and records outcomes alongside an aircraft’s autopilot. This role owns the systems engineering behind that work: reliable Rust services, explicit failure handling and integration with aircraft hardware.

Full-time in Athens, with hybrid flexibility for software development and in-person integration and testing. You will work across software, electronics and aircraft engineering. Workshop setup is part of our Athens hardware programme; specific facilities and on-site arrangements will be discussed during the hiring process.

What you’ll own

• Design, implement and review Rust services for command admission, autopilot gateways, process supervision and recorded mission outcomes.
• Bring services onto embedded Linux companion computers, including cross-compilation, packaging, startup, resource management and diagnostics.
• Develop and test autopilot and peripheral interfaces, including MAVLink communications, telemetry and command-state handling.
• Build explicit operating limits, timeouts, recovery paths and failure reporting into the execution workflow.
• Create repeatable tests in software-in-the-loop simulation and on hardware, including fault injection, interrupted communications and restart behaviour.
• Work with aircraft and avionics engineers to investigate behaviour across software, electronics and communications.
• Maintain documented interfaces, architecture decisions and test evidence, and strengthen code review, CI and release practices.

What you’ll bring

• Strong practical Rust experience, including ownership, concurrency, asynchronous I/O and error handling.
• Experience taking systems software from design through testing, deployment and difficult debugging.
• Hands-on embedded Linux experience: processes, IPC, networking, system services and constrained hardware.
• The ability to reason about time, state, resource limits and failure modes across software and hardware boundaries.
• A disciplined approach to automated testing, observability, documentation and reviewing changes.
• The judgement to own substantial technical work in a small team, communicate trade-offs clearly and work in person in Athens when integration requires it.

Useful experience

These are helpful additions to your core experience.

• UAV, robotics or other cyber-physical systems experience; familiarity with ArduPilot, PX4, MAVLink or simulation-based testing.
• Hardware-in-the-loop testing, board bring-up, serial interfaces or debugging with hardware instruments.
• Signed protocols, secure software delivery, least-privilege design or assurance work for dependable systems.
• C/C++, microcontrollers or RTOS experience alongside Rust and Linux.

Tell us about your work

Describe a Rust or embedded system you personally designed or shipped. What constraints and failure modes did you handle, how did you test it, and what did you learn? Include a non-confidential code or project link if available, and tell us about your availability for hybrid work in Athens.

Please share only work you are permitted to disclose. Keep confidential client, employer and operational information out of your application.