Software Project Engineer Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Job Summary:
Joby Aviation is a company that designs, develops, and flight-tests innovative aircraft using a software-first autonomy approach. They are seeking a Software Project Engineer to drive technical execution across their software and autonomy development portfolio, coordinating multiple workstreams and maintaining clarity around project objectives and risks.
Responsibilities:
• Own the integrated software execution plan across programs, maintaining a clear view of workstreams, dependencies, milestones, technical risks, and critical path.
• Work with software engineering leads to decompose high-level program objectives into actionable engineering work with clear priorities, owners, and acceptance criteria.
• Coordinate planning and prioritization across GNC, flight software, embedded systems, simulation, GCS, and test infrastructure teams.
• Use technical judgment to identify unrealistic plans, missing dependencies, ambiguous requirements, and integration risks before they become blockers.
• Recommend lightweight process for project management and engineering execution, adapted to the team's needs to increase development velocity without adding unnecessary overhead.
• Track and communicate schedule risks, blockers, and technical trade-offs to engineering leadership and program management. Surface problems early and drive resolution.
• Manage cross-team dependencies, particularly at the boundary between software development, hardware, systems engineering, and flight test.
• Coordinate the software design-implementation-release lifecycle in collaboration with software engineering leads, including design reviews, implementation sequencing, integration readiness, and release planning.
• Support flight test campaign planning by ensuring software deliverables are technically scoped, scheduled, tested, and tracked against test objectives.
• Help maintain team-level organization around priorities, commitments, decision records, and follow-through so that the engineering team can execute with clarity.
Qualifications:
Required:
• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or related technical field.
• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, project engineering, technical leadership, or technical execution for software-intensive systems.
• Hands-on software development experience or demonstrated ability to operate deeply in software architecture, implementation workflows, and technical risk.
• Demonstrated ability to understand complex software systems, ask high-quality technical questions, and reason about architecture, interfaces, integration, and release risk.
• Experience helping organize or drive execution in a hardware-integrated or embedded systems environment where software delivery is coupled to physical test milestones.
• Strong organizational skills with experience maintaining integrated plans across multiple concurrent technical workstreams.
• Excellent communication skills, including the ability to communicate technical plans, risks, trade-offs, and priorities clearly to both engineering and program stakeholders.
• Experience with iterative development practices in a context where requirements and program needs evolve quickly.
• Comfort with ambiguity and the ability to maintain forward progress when the plan is changing.
• Proficiency with project management and collaboration tools such as ClickUp, Jira, Smartsheet, or similar.
• This position must meet US export control compliance requirements, therefore a candidate must qualify as a 'US Person' as defined by 22 C.F.R. 120.15. 'US Person' includes US Citizens, lawful permanent residents, refugees, or asylees.
Preferred:
• Aerospace, defense, or robotics industry experience.
• Experience supporting flight test programs or hardware development programs with tightly coupled software deliverables.
• Prior experience as a software engineer, technical lead, systems engineer, project engineer, or integration engineer on a software-intensive system.
• Familiarity with software configuration management and release processes for safety-critical or embedded systems.
• Understanding of GNC, flight software, embedded systems, build systems, simulation, and modern software development processes.
• Familiarity with systems engineering processes, including requirements management, V&V planning, traceability, and interface definition.
• Experience managing cross-site technical execution or coordinating between engineering and flight test at different locations.
Company:
Joby Aviation is an aerospace transportation company developing electric aircrafts. Founded in 2009, the company is headquartered in Santa Cruz, USA, with a team of 1001-5000 employees. The company is currently Late Stage.