Embedded Validation Engineer — HIL & Automated Flight Tests

Namely; South San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Bonuses

Medical/Dental/Vision insurance

Paid time off

Job summary

Zipline is seeking an Embedded Software Validation Engineer to build scalable validation infrastructure for the embedded platform powering autonomous aircraft. You will design simulation and HIL environments, develop automated test scenarios, and collaborate with flight software teams to ensure reliability and safety-critical performance.

In this role you will contribute to CI pipelines, validation workflows, and observability enhancements, enabling rapid, safe deployment of software changes

Qualifications

• Experience developing embedded or systems software.
• Professional experience with Rust, Python, or similar programming languages.
• Experience working with embedded Linux systems.
• Strong understanding of systems-level concepts including concurrency, networking, interprocess communication, distributed or multi-process systems.
• Experience designing automated test frameworks or validation infrastructure.
• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills across software and hardware boundaries.
• Ability to collaborate closely with software engineers to improve system quality and testability.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain automated validation infrastructure for embedded platform software.
• Build simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test environments that exercise platform services under realistic operating conditions.
• Develop automated test scenarios covering IPC, logging/observability, OTA updates, and live telemetry.
• Design tests for functionality, reliability, performance, and fault conditions.
• Develop stress, endurance, regression, and fault-injection test suites for distributed embedded systems.
• Partner with Embedded Platform engineers to improve testability and validation strategies.
• Build tooling for automated test orchestration, execution, reporting, and dashboards.
• Contribute to CI pipelines and automated validation workflows.
• Investigate failures across simulation, HIL, and production to identify root causes.
• Occasionally contribute improvements to production embedded software to increase reliability.

Skills

Embedded software

Rust

Python

Embedded Linux

IPC

Distributed systems

Concurrency

Debugging

Collaboration

Job description

Zipline is seeking an Embedded Software Validation Engineer to build scalable validation infrastructure for the embedded platform powering autonomous aircraft. You will design simulation and HIL environments, develop automated test scenarios, and collaborate with flight software teams to ensure reliability and safety-critical performance.

In this role you will contribute to CI pipelines, validation workflows, and observability enhancements, enabling rapid, safe deployment of software changes