The setting
builds autonomy technology for vehicles and machines. is software and hardware that lets drones act on their own, made for defense and commercial customers.
HIL failures need fast ownership without turning incomplete evidence into a false diagnosis.
The triage flow must preserve scarce flight-test time while keeping engineers accountable for what the logs actually support.
Who you’d be doing this for
“We lost the morning slot because nobody could say whether that HIL failure was even ours.”
Kazuki Deng · UAS Operations Manager · a character in this brief
Plans coordinated aircraft activity and depends on integration issues being resolved before limited live-test windows.
What is at stake
HIL failures are returning without an agreed owner before flight-test preparation. You must decide whether AI only assembles evidence or also proposes the first owner and priority.
Why it isn’t already fixed
Every obvious fix costs something else. That’s the part you’d have to decide.
- protected test windows vs. open engineering queue
- consistent intake vs. rich engineering context
- fewer repeat runs vs. broader failure coverage
- automation scope vs. investigation quality
Why Applied Intuition
Drone autonomy integration depends on proving software and hardware behavior before mixed aircraft reach live flight tests.
Written with these in mind
Not your kind of problem? 93 more at Applied Intuition, or browse every organization.
Where the organization context comes fromThe postings this brief was written from, and the reporting read before it.
The organization context comes from public information. The situation and characters are written for the brief.
Job postings it was written from
Public descriptions of the work at Applied Intuition. They are listed as sources, not as openings. The lines under a posting are its own words, where it meets this brief.
- Senior C++ Software Engineer - Drone Stack (opens in a new tab)
- You will integrate hardware and software onto vehicle platforms and deploy autonomy algorithms in both SIL, HIL and live test environments.
- Integrate autonomy software into hardware in collaboration with autonomy engineers that supports full integration with aircraft autopilots, datalinks, sensors, PNT/GPS/INS, ground control stations, etc.
- GNC Engineer (Guidance, Navigation & Control) (opens in a new tab)
- Your work will involve developing, integrating, and testing core flight autonomy capabilities that span all classes of aerial platforms (Group 1-5).
- Collaborate with DoD warfighter domain experts and 3rd party UAS vehicle vendors to develop and integrate aerial autonomy software onto OEM hardware
- Software Engineer - Robotics (opens in a new tab)
- Other days you'll be back in the office, deep in SIL and HIL environments, working through the complex autonomy and vehicle intelligence systems that span both hardware and software domains.
- Conduct system-level setup, testing, and validation, including software-in-the-loop (SIL) and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) evaluations
- Software Engineer - Multi-Agent UAV Autonomy (Defense) (opens in a new tab)
This is the setup. The work is inside.
Running it puts you in the room: the full situation and its constraints, stakeholders who push back in their own words, and the decisions that are yours to make. What you produce becomes a Day One Plan — work you can show someone instead of describing.
Where similar work appears
Other live briefs connected to this one, and what connects them.
The same setting, from another role
Each is set around Applied Intuition’s Drone autonomy stack (DroneStack), written for a different role. They’re separate briefs, not the same scenario.
Vibration-related anomalies are returning because evidence is split across test results, build records, and failure reports.
You must decide where the correlation package stops and the mechanical engineers start, from joining the records in Python to naming the physical cause and entering it in Jira.
Payload changes are forcing crews to rebuild mounts and reroute cables between missions.
You must weigh field reconfiguration against flight time, survivability, and a pilot build that can be repeated.
One aircraft lost navigation quality during a vibration-heavy climb, putting the next multi-aircraft evaluation at risk.
You must weigh a durable avionics bay against the flight-time and release cost of added structure.