Software Engineer
Pyka
Software Engineering
Alameda, CA, USA
USD 118k-168k / year + Equity
Posted on Dec 12, 2025
About Pyka
Pyka’s goal is to provide society with a new form of safe, clean, and cost-effective transportation enabled by autonomous electric aviation.
To get there, we’re taking a different approach than most. We're applying our technologies to every industry where autonomous electric aircraft can be useful, starting with the highest value and most dangerous jobs. In doing so, we're building game-changing products manufactured at scale, while perfecting the safety, reliability, and capabilities of our autonomy engine and electric propulsion systems.
We design, develop and manufacture an ecosystem of technologies including proprietary flight control software, avionics, high power density motors, motor controllers, batteries, and custom carbon-fiber composite airframes.
Today, we supply autonomous electric aircraft for cargo transport and crop protection to real-world customers across four separate continents and have secured industry-first regulatory approvals from the FAA. Our cargo aircraft enables remote connectivity, enhances express delivery networks, and ensures fast and reliable shipping of critical supplies to areas in need. Our crop protection aircraft offers agricultural services providers and farmers an autonomous tool to make aerial application safer, more precise, and less harmful to surrounding environments. Both vehicles are highly economical to operate, easy to deploy, and significantly reduce C02 emissions in their respective industries.
What you work on at Pyka makes people’s lives better now and brings the future of electric aviation one step closer each day.
Role Overview
Pyka is looking for a Software Engineer with broad technical curiosity and a passion for building software that directly affects how autonomous aircraft behave in the real world. In this role, you’ll contribute across Pyka’s flight control stack, ground systems, and supporting infrastructure — developing new features, improving reliability, and helping ensure our aircraft operate safely and predictably. You’ll work on a wide range of challenges, from path planning and failure detection to ground station communication, UI features, and automated testing. This is a hands-on engineering role where you’ll collaborate closely with flight test, operations, autonomy, and embedded teams. If you love understanding how real systems behave — and you’re excited to build software that interacts with the physical world — this role is for you.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement new software features across the flight control stack and ground systems, spanning failure detection, failsafe behavior, path planning, path following, communication links, UI components, and more
- Contribute to Pyka’s test infrastructure and automated test suites, improving reliability and development velocity
- Debug and resolve software issues uncovered during flight testing, often under real-world operational constraints
- Support flight operations teams in real time, helping diagnose and resolve software-related issues in the field
- Analyze flight data to troubleshoot both software and hardware issues, identifying root causes and performance improvements
Required Qualifications
- 3+ years of professional software development experience
- Strong experience with C++ (preferably C++11 or newer), Linux, and git
- Experience designing, testing, and debugging software that controls hardware (robots, vehicles, actuators, sensors, etc.)
- Familiarity with robotic systems, autonomous systems, or other safety-critical domains
- Experience analyzing data logs (telemetry, sensor data, or time-series data)
- Working knowledge of trigonometry and linear algebra
- Ability to learn quickly and dive into unfamiliar codebases to root-cause subtle bugs
- Appetite for live support with a drive for issue containment and resolution
- We understand that candidates bring different strengths and experiences, and you don’t need to meet every qualification to be considered. If this role excites you, we’d love to learn more about you. You may be a great fit even if your background doesn’t align perfectly with the list.
Compensation and Benefits
- 118,000-168,000 per year base salary + equity. Compensation will vary depending on location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Salary ranges are subject to change.
- Employer-sponsored health, dental and vision insurance
- FSA with employer matching
- 401(k)
- Paid holidays, generous PTO, and additional unpaid time off
- Voluntary short-term disability, long-term disability, and life insurance
- Pre-tax commuter benefits
- Free catered lunch and plenty of snacks
Export Control Requirements
This position requires access to technology, software and other information that is subject to governmental access control restrictions, due to export controls. Employment in this position is conditioned on the continued availability of government authorization to authorize release of such items, to the extent required, including without limitation an export license, or other documentation required to establish authorization to receive access to such items.
Company may delay commencement of employment, rescind an offer of employment, terminate employment, and/or may modify job responsibilities, compensation, benefits, and/or access to Company facilities and information systems, as Company deems appropriate, in order to ensure compliance with applicable government access control restrictions.
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We do not work with external recruiters; if you are an external recruiter, please do not reach out.