Embedded Validation Engineer: HIL & Automation

Zipline; Ann Arbor (MI); On-site; USD 160,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline is seeking an Embedded Software Validation Engineer to build automated validation infrastructure for its safety-critical embedded platform powering autonomous aircraft. You will design and run simulation, HIL tests, and automated scenarios across IPC, logging, OTA, and cloud connectivity.

You will collaborate with Flight Software and Embedded Platform teams to ensure reliability, performance, and fault tolerance, while expanding test coverage and observability in a fast-growing,

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, IPC, 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 core platform capabilities including IPC, logging/observability, bridges, OTA updates, live telemetry and cloud connectivity.
• Design tests that validate functionality, reliability, performance, and behavior under fault conditions.
• Develop stress, endurance, regression, and fault-injection test suites for distributed embedded systems.
• Partner with Embedded Platform engineers to improve testability and define validation strategies during feature design.
• 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 environments to identify root causes.
• Occasionally improve production embedded software to increase reliability, observability, or testability.
• Build automated validation infrastructure that enables engineers to rapidly verify platform changes with confidence.
• Increase coverage of simulation and HIL testing across the Embedded Platform stack.
• Identify reliability and performance issues before they reach flight hardware.
• Improve observability/testability of core middleware through collaboration with platform engineers.
• Enable Flight Software to move faster while maintaining reliability of safety-critical systems.

Skills

Embedded software

Rust

Python

Embedded Linux

IPC

Validation infrastructure

Debugging

Tools

CI/CD

Job description

Zipline is seeking an Embedded Software Validation Engineer to build automated validation infrastructure for its safety-critical embedded platform powering autonomous aircraft. You will design and run simulation, HIL tests, and automated scenarios across IPC, logging, OTA, and cloud connectivity.

You will collaborate with Flight Software and Embedded Platform teams to ensure reliability, performance, and fault tolerance, while expanding test coverage and observability in a fast-growing,