**IMPORTANT: We're building something big and that starts with an incredible team. This an in-person position and you'll work alongside our growing technical team in the office in Syracuse, New York on most work days. You must be a U.S. Citizen or U.S. Permanent Resident with authorization to work to apply. We unfortunately cannot accept applicants who are in the U.S. solely with a work visa, student visa, or require visa sponsorship. Please help us find the right person and refrain from applying if you do not live in the Syracuse area or do not plan on relocating. **

WHO WE ARE

Flyhound is a cutting-edge drone payload company focused on public safety. We specialize in the rapid detection and localization of individuals honing on their mobile phones. Our mission is simple but powerful: help first responders in finding people in emergencies to save lives.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

We're looking for a systems-minded embedded software engineer (entry to mid-level) to own the architecture of the software that powers our airborne payload. You'll work end-to-end across the stack—real-time data ingest, processing pipelines, local API, secure logging—and partner closely with the hardware team on HW/SW trade-offs, next-gen platform choices, and system budgets. Your mandate: ship robust code that moves data reliably from payload to ground— with zero surprises in latency, memory, or power.

This role is ideal for someone who loves architecting pragmatic, measurable improvements , reducing complexity, and making the whole system sing as a core team member in a venture-backed startup ready to scale.

KEY REPONSIBILITIES

• Own the software architecture for the payload: process model, threading, IPC, state management, and update strategy (OTA).
• Lead HW/SW co-design with EE/ME: inform compute module, storage, thermal, and radio I/O choices; define testable budgets (latency, CPU, memory, I/O).
• Make data flow bulletproof: real-time ingestion from sensors/RF, buffering and back-pressure, on-device preprocessing, and resilient delivery to the ground app.
• Drive resource efficiency: profile and optimize to eliminate swap/paging under mission loads , reduce copy/allocs, and keep CPU within thermal/power limits; partner with HW to improve SWaP.
• Build a clean local API for on-site ops; design safe reconnect behavior and secure log uploads when back online.
• Harden the system: watchdogs, graceful degradation, persistence strategy, crash reporting, and reproducible builds.
• Raise the bar: establish coding standards, CI, code review discipline, and performance regression tests.

WHAT'S REQUIRED

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field (Master's preferred).
• Experience with embedded/Linux systems in C/C++ (modern C++ preferred) with strong fundamentals in concurrency, memory, and numerics.
• Hands-on real-time, multi-threaded development on resource-constrained devices; comfort with ring buffers, lock-free queues, and DMA-friendly I/O.
• Proven systems thinking : can turn requirements into budgets, interfaces, and measurable SLAs (latency, throughput, memory).
• Practical performance work using tools like perf , valgrind , gprof , strace , bcc/eBPF , heap/CPU profilers.
• Experience integrating with hardware: SPI/I²C/UART, GPIO/interrupts, timers, and board bring-up in collaboration with EE.

WHAT'S GREAT TO HAVE

These are some of the skills and experiences that would give you an advantage at succeeding in this role.

• Airborne/robotics or other real-time sensing applications; comfort with Software Defined Radios and high-rate data streams.
• Familiarity with mobile/cellular stacks (srsRAN/OpenAirInterface) or RF processing pipelines.
• Linux build systems and distros for devices ( Yocto/OpenWrt ), containerization where appropriate ( Docker/Podman ), and secure OTA.
• Robust IPC/serialization ( ZeroMQ, gRPC, Protobuf/FlatBuffers ); telemetry and health monitoring.
• Cloud basics for field ops: secure artifact hosting, remote logging/metrics ( AWS or similar ).

HOW WE WORK

• Entrepreneurial & practical: we ship, measure, and iterate.
• Collaborative: you will pair with the founding team and our hardware engineers daily.
• Mission-driven: public-safety users rely on us in time-critical situations.

THE OTHER STUFF

Flyhound is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, colour, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.

Flyhound is based in downtown Syracuse, NY at the brand new INSPYRE Innovation Hub. The role is primarily in-person with a hybrid opportunity to complete some work at home.

NY STATE SALARY RANGE DISCLOSURE: $76,000 - $105,000 per year with options for an equity stake.

We're looking forward to hearing from you!