Avionics Lead (2-week contract, NYC area, on-site)

Buoyant Aero builds small, autonomous airships. We’ll use our airships to affordably transport cargo in remote and rural communities, increasing quality of life and economic opportunity.

At Buoyant Aero you’ll have the opportunity to design, build and fly a new unmanned aircraft from scratch. We’re a small and growing team of engineers, backed by some of the best investors in the world. We’re moving quickly to bring our aircraft to market, and we’re looking for people who want to make affordable air cargo by drone airship a reality.

We’re looking for a hands-on RC aircraft builder/pilot to help us get a custom shaped blimp inflatable (LTA + tilt-rotor VTOL) flying outdoors.

This is a 2-4 week, full-time, on-site contract focused on real flight and simulation. You’ll be working directly on a non-standard aircraft with custom control mixing, thrust vectoring, and field testing.

What you’ll be doing

• ArduPilot Plane on Pixhawk Cube Orange
• Custom mixer logic, and programming (tilt rotors, nonstandard geometry)
• Full avionics integration (GPS, telemetry, power, ESCs, servos)
• Failsafes (RC/GPS/telemetry loss, etc.)
• Hands-on wiring (crimping, soldering, looms)
• Managing physics simulations to tune with hardware in the loop
• Outdoor flight testing + piloting

You should have

• Built, wired, programmed, and flown your own RC aircraft
• Strong ArduPilot / Pixhawk experience
• Experience with unusual configs (VTOL, vectored thrust, etc.)
• Comfort debugging hardware + control issues in the field

To apply

Send links/photos of 3+ aircraft you’ve personally built and flown

We're building a new type of aircraft. Our airship files with a mix of buoyant from helium lifting gas, and aerodynamic lift. It's the most energy-efficient way to fly, allowing us to build an aircraft that can take off and land vertically while also being half the cost of a small plane.

We're designing the vehicle from scratch, including aero structures, the propulsion system, and control and autonomy to drop off cargo without human intervention.