Embedded Software Internship

About HyLight

We're on a mission to make the world more resilient to climate change.

About HyLight

We're on a mission to make the world more resilient to climate change.
We build HyLighters, autonomous hydrogen airships that fly silently over the planet's critical infrastructure, spotting methane leaks and preventing power outages and wildfires, all with zero emissions. By 2030, we want to be the global leader in aerial monitoring.
We've proven it flies. Now we're building the company to match the ambition, backed by Y Combinator and top-tier investors, with the resources to move fast and think big.
We don't care about traditional roles or titles. We just want people who are smart, proactive, and bring founder-level ownership. If you can bring a diverse point of view, push it forward: it will be highly appreciated.

Job Summary

You'll contribute to the software architecture of the HyLighter, our next-generation autonomous airship for aerial inspection and environmental monitoring. This is a software-first embedded internship: you will develop your embedded skills while contributing to architecture, code quality, and the tooling that allows a team to ship reliable flight software fast.
You will work on drone open-source software such as PX4 and QGroundControl (QGC), and contribute to defining how our onboard and ground software is structured, built, tested, and deployed. A key part of the mission is to help design clean abstractions over our hardware so that a HyLighter can be driven as a single, coherent machine, while contributing to the CI/CD and continuous-development practices that make the architecture maintainable as we scale.

Mission

Under the guidance of the CTO and Embedded team, you will:

• Contribute to software architecture: Help design and improve the architecture of our embedded systems (onboard and ground), with clean interfaces and modularity that make the system easy to extend and test.
• Develop hardware abstraction layers: Contribute to designing abstractions that allow us to control sensors, actuators, and subsystems as one machine, decoupling application logic from underlying hardware.
• Improve CI/CD and continuous development: Support the implementation of pipelines, automated tests, build/release tooling, and workflows that allow the team to 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: Contribute to improving existing avionics and embedded software through testing, debugging, and development.
• Drive technical studies: Participate in system architecture studies 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 following skills are not all mandatory. If you don't match everything but are motivated to grow, we want to meet you. We see this internship as a potential path toward future technical leadership positions at HyLight.

Education:

Final-year Master's degree (or equivalent) in Embedded Systems, Software Engineering, Electronics, Computer Engineering, Robotics, or a related field.

Experience:

Previous internship(s), academic projects, research experience, or personal projects involving embedded development, software architecture, robotics, drones, or autonomous systems.

CI/CD:

Exposure to continuous integration / continuous deployment workflows through academic projects, personal projects, or previous internships (pipelines, automated testing, build and release processes).

PX4 / drones:

Experience with PX4, MAVLink, and QGroundControl is a strong advantage, ideally through academic projects, student teams, research, or personal projects.

Technical Skills

• Architecture: Understanding of software architecture and system design principles for embedded platforms; interest in hardware abstraction layers, modular design, and testable interfaces.
• CI/CD & tooling: Familiarity with Git/GitHub, CI/CD systems (e.g. GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or equivalent), containerization (Docker), automated testing, and hardware-in-the-loop testing.
• Pro