Lead Software Engineer - Aircraft

Description

About Manna

At Manna, we're changing how the world receives things — by taking delivery to the skies.

Our mission is simple but ambitious: to make high-speed suburban delivery affordable, green, and safe. We design and build our own aviation-grade drones that deliver food, coffee, groceries, and more — directly from local stores and vendors to people's doors in just a few minutes.

We're a team that Drive with Impact, are Safety Focused, and knows that the best ideas come from Team Players who show up as their Authentic Selves. We move fast, we are passionate about what we do, and we're always pushing a growth mindset to be better — in everything we do.

If you want to build world-changing technology with real-world impact (and have a bit of fun while doing it), you'll love it here.

Welcome to Manna — where we deliver the future.

Role Purpose

As the Lead Software Engineer on the Aircraft team, you will drive the technical strategy for onboard and embedded aircraft systems. You'll set long-term architecture direction, lead high-stakes multi-project delivery, and mentor senior engineers across the wider software organisation.

This role is ideal for someone who is equally comfortable going deep on embedded/robotics software and stepping back to shape systems, standards, and teams.

Key Responsibilities

Define the architecture for aircraft onboard software and supporting firmware.

Set standards for reliability, performance, and scalability across aircraft systems.

Contribute to architectural decisions that span multiple teams (e.g., Aircraft ↔ Airspace ↔ QA).

Lead design reviews for critical components, ensuring high-confidence deployment in safety-critical environments.

Ensure roadmap execution while balancing near-term operational needs with long-term system health.

Own risk management, rollout strategy, incident learnings, and continuous improvement for aircraft software.

Partner closely with Hardware, Autonomy, Operations, and Aviation stakeholders.

Mentor senior engineers and grow technical leadership depth on the team.

Provide day-to-day technical leadership and coaching to software engineers.

Support hiring and onboarding to grow team capacity.

Requirements

Skills & Education

8-12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time spent on embedded, robotics, or safety-critical systems.

Deep expertise in C++ and Embedded C/C++; strong systems-level Python experience beneficial.

Track record defining architecture across complex, hardware-adjacent software environments.

Demonstrated technical leadership across multiple complex projects, including setting architecture direction and owning delivery outcomes. Experience working in safety-critical domains such as aviation, aerospace, robotics, automotive, or industrial systems.

Strong debugging instincts across software ↔ hardware boundaries.

History of mentoring senior engineers; people-management, growing technical capability across teams.

Experience leading design reviews, risk assessments, and incident learnings in high-reliability environments.

Experience with autonomy, avionics, drones, robotics, or real-time control systems.

Familiarity with flight stacks (ArduPilot/PX4), ROS/ROS2, or equivalent embedded platforms.

Experience with power systems, battery management, charging firmware, or similar hardware-integrated domains.

Background in safety cases or reliability engineering for operational systems.

• This role is based in Dublin, Ireland