Hands-On Flight Systems Controls Engineer - Data-Driven Tuning

SiFly; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

SiFly is developing a new category of vertical-takeoff, long-endurance drones. The role focuses on designing test campaigns, instrumentation, and dashboards to track weight, performance, and reliability.

You will tune PX4 configurations, analyze flight data, and communicate findings to engineers. This hands-on position requires working on bench, shop, flight line, and sometimes customer sites.

Qualifications

• Hands-on flight test or systems test on real aircraft.
• Experience closing the loop from controls to autopilot parameters or code on real equipment.
• Estimation and control fundamentals: coordinate frames, Kalman filtering and sensor fusion.
• Data analysis and scripting - Python or equivalent - for reducing test data into something actionable.
• FAA Part 107 certification if not already certified.

Responsibilities

• Plan and execute test campaigns end to end - objectives, success criteria, test cards, instrumentation, and safety and site coordination.
• Choose the right validation modality for each question: simulation, log replay, hardware-in-the-loop, ground test, or flight.
• Tune and test changes to PX4 - parameters, control and estimation tuning, and configuration - and validate them in the air.
• Analyze flight logs and telemetry to diagnose issues across firmware, hardware, and companion computers.
• Build and maintain test infrastructure: benches, HIL setups, instrumentation, and data pipelines and dashboards behind them.
• Own the progression from bench test, through integrated ground runs, to flight - and the anomaly reports and configuration records that make a campaign reconstructable.
• Generate the flight test evidence used in SiFly's FAA submissions.
• Find, build, and share AI-assisted approaches to this work - log analysis, test data reduction, reporting - and bring the team along with what works.

Skills

Flight test experience

Data analysis

Python scripting

Kalman filtering

Sensor fusion

Autopilot parameter tuning

Hands-on hardware experience

Problem solving

Tools

ROS 2

MAVSDK

Linux

HIL setups

Job description

SiFly is developing a new category of vertical-takeoff, long-endurance drones. The role focuses on designing test campaigns, instrumentation, and dashboards to track weight, performance, and reliability.

You will tune PX4 configurations, analyze flight data, and communicate findings to engineers. This hands-on position requires working on bench, shop, flight line, and sometimes customer sites.