New capabilities are tested thousands of times in simulation before they go onto our UAVs. In this role you'll build and maintain that simulation environment.
Minerva Defence is one of the fastest-growing defence technology companies in Europe. We create the software, hardware and networking that make unmanned systems effective on the modern battlefield, all designed and manufactured end-to-end in the UK, and in active use today. We are deliberately low-profile: a team of around 60, small in headcount and outsized in effect. We look for people who are not just talented but genuinely committed to the work, the team, and the purpose behind it.
The role
You will develop and maintain simulation software that our engineers and customers depend on daily and integrate changes across connected applications and services where needed. Simulated tooling is critical for the company, as it is where flight control and autonomous systems are proven before deployment and where operators are trained and rehearse missions.
It is also where we first test our suite of software systems together. Flight control, autonomy, communications and ground control software run together in the simulation before they are integrated on real hardware. This helps us identify problems that only emerge when complex systems interact.
The work spans, C++ simulation software, physics, networking and application development across several software stacks. The challenges include rigid-body dynamics and numerical stability, real-time budgets, networked state management, and integrating our flight control software with simulation. You also should expect to be involved in flight testing to gather real-world validation data.
We are looking for an engineer that is a few years into their career who can own features and improvements from design and implementation through testing and delivery. You will work alongside people with deep knowledge of the aircraft, its control systems and operators, so do not need to have come from a defence or aerospace background.
Responsibilities
- Build and extend our real-time simulation of the UAVs, their sensors, and the environment they operate in.
- Develop vehicle dynamics models and validate them against measured flight data.
- Integrate the aircraft's flight control and autonomy software with the simulation so it can be tested before deployment.
- Provide the environment where flight control, autonomy, communications, and ground control software are integrated and exercised together, to surface faults in simulation, rather than in the field.
- Scale the simulation across many vehicles at once over lossy, contested and degraded networks.
- Make the simulation effective, reliable, and accessible for regular use by developers, trainers, and end users.
- Automate headless simulation runs, repeatable scenarios and results reporting in our CI/CD pipelines.
- Build virtual environments and scenarios from real-world data that look realistic and authentic to humans as well as image processing systems.
- Bringing multiple subsystems together into a working whole and finding the faults that only appear once they run.
- Replay logged flight data through the models to reproduce what happened in the air and turn it into a regression test.
- Support the training and mission-rehearsal use of the simulation
- Generate synthetic sensor data for our computer vision and perception models.
- Take part in flight testing to gather validation data and see the real system behave.
Requirements
Minimum
- Proven experience writing high-performance, modern C++ with hard real-time and determinism constraints.
- Willingness to work and learn across application code, engine, networking, tooling and build systems.
- Comfortable with version control and CI/CD, and automated testing.
- Willingness to be involved in field testing and validation against real flight.
- Eligible for UK security clearance (SC): UK citizen or 5+ years UK residency.
Preferred
- A solid grounding in the mathematics of physical simulation: rigid-body dynamics, numerical integration, and coordinate frames and conventions.
- Flight dynamics or 6-DOF modelling, and experience validating a model against measured real-world data.
- Distributed or networked simulation: time synchronisation, state replication, and behaviour over unreliable links.
- Model-, software-, hardware- or vehicle-in-the-loop testing (MIL, SIL, HIL, VIL)
- Experience with autonomous aerospace systems,.autonomous vehicles, motorsports, robotics or simulation-heavy games development.
- Experience with a real-time simulation engine, on the systems and performance side rather than content.
- Virtual reality development, or human-in-the-loop trials that put real operators in front of a simulation.
- Model-based design and verification from another regulated domain: MATLAB/Simulink, SysML, ISO 26262 or DO-178C.
- Python for tooling, data analysis, and automation.
- Familiarity with Unreal Engine or similar engine.
- Experience using AI coding agents to speed up development and respond to changing requirements,
- Knowledge of building guardrails that keep AI agents within scope and enforce code quality.
Benefits
We offer competitive compensation including;
- Share options vesting over three years
- Bupa private medical insurance
- 6% employer pension contribution
- 25 days leave plus bank holidays
- Enhanced mat/pat leave
- Enterprise level AI tooling
- Relocation support/home office budget