Embedded Software Engineer - Architecture & CI/CD at HyLight in Paris

Job description

About HyLight Power lines, gas pipelines and railways are still inspected the way they were 50 years ago: by helicopter. Expensive, noisy, and up to a tonne of CO₂ per flight hour. We built the alternative. The HyLighter is a 12-metre autonomous airship running on hydrogen. It flies for up to 10 hours, almost silently, and spots a 1 mm defect from 25 metres up. But the airship is only half the story. Every flight brings back massive amounts of LiDAR, imagery and methane data, and that’s where the value is. Our AI turns it into what operators act on: 50+ types of defects detected automatically, and leaks pinpointed across their network. It’s not a prototype. HyLighters already fly missions for France’s largest energy and rail operators and have flown over the Palace of Versailles. Backed by Y Combinator, we just raised €13M to go from 4 airships to 15. Working at HyLight We design, build and fly every HyLighter, and turn its data into insight, all under one roof on a former airbase. Which means: You own it all the way. At a big aerospace company, you’d own a small piece of one subsystem. Here, you design it, test it, stand on the airfield when it flies, and see the client act on the data it brings back. Weeks, not years. Ideas go from whiteboard to flight test in weeks. Responsibility from day one. The founders’ average age is 27. Nobody here waits for permission. We don’t care about titles or ticking every box. We care about what you build and the perspective you bring, so if your profile is different, apply anyway. Job Summary You'll own the software architecture of the HyLighter, our next-generation autonomous airship for aerial inspection and environmental monitoring. This is a software-first embedded role: you bring real embedded experience, but your center of gravity is architecture, code quality, and the tooling that lets a team ship reliable flight software fast. You will work on drone open-source software such as PX4 and QGroundControl (QGC), and you will define how our onboard and ground software is structured, built, tested, and deployed. A key part of the mission is to design a clean abstraction layer over our hardware so that a HyLighter can be driven as a single, coherent machine, and to put in place the CI/CD and continuous-development practices that make that architecture maintainable as we scale. Mission Under the guidance of the CTO, you will: Own the software architecture: define the global architecture of our embedded systems (onboard and ground), with clean interfaces and modularity that make the system easy to extend and test. Build a hardware abstraction layer: design the abstraction that lets us control sensors, actuators and subsystems as one machine, decoupling application logic from the underlying hardware. Set up CI/CD and continuous development: put in place the pipelines, automated tests, build/release tooling and workflows (CI, CD, continuous integration of new features) that let the team develop and deploy with confidence. Work with PX4: extend and integrate PX4-based flight software and the QGC ground station to fit the HyLighter's needs. Enhance robustness and reliability of existing avionics and embedded software. Drive technical studies and system architecture for future features (steerable airships, advanced testing facilities, new onboard systems) and payload integration / data-capture automation. Personal Note from Josef (CTO) "This role is the backbone of how we build software at HyLight. We have flight code, ground tools, test benches and custom machines, and we need someone who can bring real architecture to all of it and the CI/CD discipline that keeps it reliable as we grow. If you love designing clean systems, working close to the hardware through PX4, and building the pipelines that let a team move fast without breaking things, this is your spot. The team is still small (around 18 people), so your architecture decisions will have immediate, visible impact." Profile Sought The follow