Fotokite is a Zürich-based technology company building tethered drones for first responders and defence. Our Fotokite Sigma delivers persistent, multi-day, aerial situational awareness to customers worldwide. We develop the full drone stack in-house, from flight control firmware to video processing, cloud backends, user interfaces, and manufacture our systems right here in Zürich.
As a (Senior) Generalist Software Engineer, your main focus is Linux-level software on the Sigma ground station, which runs on the Nvidia Jetson platform: from the base image and system services to image and video processing. Around that core, you also work on our manufacturing tooling and cloud services, writing mainly Go and Python. You take problems from the first report to the shipped fix, work closely with production, support and hardware colleagues, and help make sure that no critical system depends on a single person. You work with a high degree of autonomy, set technical direction in your area, and are trusted to make the call when there is no one else to ask.
What is your daily mission:
- Develop Linux-level software for the Sigma ground station on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX: system services, networking, device configuration, security hardening and the ground station's configuration interface.
- Build and optimize image and video processing on the Jetson
- Build and operate cloud services and internal tools in Go and Python on Google Cloud, such as fleet management, production APIs, over-the-air update services and log pipelines.
- Automate with Bash and Python and keep our engineering foundations healthy: Docker build images, CI pipelines on GitHub, dependency and toolchain updates, and a reliable release process.
- Act as an escalation point for customer support, production and software alerts: analyse logs and fleet data, tell hardware faults from software bugs, reproduce issues on real hardware and deliver fixes.
What you bring to the team:
- Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or a related field, or equivalent work experience
- 4+ years of professional software development experience
- Strong skills in multiple programming languages, including strongly typed as well as scripting languages
- Strong Linux system knowledge: systemd, package management, networking, users and permissions, boot process, and debugging on remote devices over SSH
- Strong networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, DHCP and static addressing, routing, VLANs, firewalls, and debugging with tools like tcpdump or Wireshark
- Hands-on experience with Docker, Git/GitHub and CI/CD
- Experience building backend services and internal tools (REST APIs, SQL databases)
- A generalist mindset: you pick up unfamiliar codebases quickly, enjoy switching between hardware-near and cloud work, and take ownership from diagnosis to release
- Fluency in English is required, any other language is a plus
Nice to Have:
- Experience with the Jetson platform (bring up, L4T, device trees, video processing, CUDA)
- Experience in Video streaming technologies such as RTSP or WebRTC
- Practical experience with image or video processing on Linux (e.g. camera pipelines, GStreamer, OpenCV, V4L2, hardware-accelerated encoding)
- Experience with specific Google Cloud Platform products (Cloud Run, BigQuery) as well as Infrastructure as Code - Terraform
- Drones or robotics experience, e.g. MAVLink, PX4 or ROS
- Windows Application Development Experience (C++, Qt)
- Manufacturing test, test automation or hardware-in-the-loop setups, incl. microcontroller flashing and secure provisioning
- Cellular modems and industrial networking equipment
- Experience with regulatory frameworks (e.g. NDAA, BlueUAS/GreenUAS, CE/CRA, RemoteID)
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This position description summarizes the main duties of the job. It neither prescribes nor restricts the exact tasks that may be required to carry out these duties. This document should not be construed in any way to represent a contract of employment. Management reserves the right to review and revise this document at any time.
Skills Required
- Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent work experience
- 4+ years of professional software development experience
- Strong skills in multiple programming languages, including strongly typed and scripting languages
- Strong Linux systems knowledge, including systemd, package management, networking, users and permissions, boot processes, and remote SSH debugging
- Strong networking fundamentals, including TCP/IP, DHCP, static addressing, routing, VLANs, firewalls, tcpdump, or Wireshark
- Hands-on experience with Docker, Git, GitHub, and CI/CD
- Experience building backend services and internal tools, including REST APIs and SQL databases
- Fluency in English
- Experience with the NVIDIA Jetson platform, including bring-up, L4T, device trees, video processing, or CUDA
- Experience with video streaming technologies such as RTSP or WebRTC
- Practical Linux image or video processing experience, including camera pipelines, GStreamer, OpenCV, V4L2, or hardware-accelerated encoding
- Experience with Google Cloud products such as Cloud Run or BigQuery and Infrastructure as Code using Terraform
- Drone or robotics experience, such as MAVLink, PX4, or ROS
- Windows application development experience using C++ or Qt
- Manufacturing test, test automation, hardware-in-the-loop, microcontroller flashing, or secure provisioning experience
- Experience with cellular modems and industrial networking equipment
- Experience with regulatory frameworks such as NDAA, BlueUAS/GreenUAS, CE/CRA, or RemoteID
What We Do
Our team believes in a future where autonomous robotics are used in meaningful, accountable applications. Commercial UAVs have the technical capabilities to help save lives and share important stories- but they have continued to be held back by fundamental problems in safety, regulation, and flight time. By solving these fundamental issues, our team is able to offer the next generation of accountable and autonomous aerial robotics that are ready for real-world use today. Fotokite technology uses a tether combined with an onboard IMU to compute the vehicle's position relative to the user. This allows for quick deployment and controlled flight by virtually anyone and obviates the need for complex start-up protocols, GPS dependency, trained pilots, and bulky remote controls. The core algorithms were developed and refined over the course of years of research and experimentation at the world renowned Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zurich. With this foundation in place, the team is now working on expanding control capabilities with a keen eye on delivering intuitive user interaction, enabling expanded capabilities to teams in Firefighting and Public Safety applications.
