Santa Clara, CA SQA Lead

SiFly Aviation, Inc.; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

SiFly Aviation, Inc. seeks a hands-on SQA Lead to anchor quality across the software stack and scale quality engineering as production flight approaches.

You will set testing strategy, build automation, and drive a green, release-ready process while mentoring QA engineers in Santa Clara and Turkey. You will own end-to-end QA, implement SITL/HITL workflows, and integrate tests with CI, simulation, and live aircraft testing.

Qualifications

• Minimum 5+ years of professional experience in software quality assurance or test engineering.
• Senior QA/test engineering experience, with automated test systems and CI pipelines.
• Strong Python for test automation, log analysis, orchestration, and tooling.
• Experience owning quality across distributed systems and hardware/software boundaries.
• Mentoring engineers and leading QA practices across teams.
• Advanced English language skills for distributed teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the QA strategy end-to-end and define release gates and criteria.
• Build automated regression suites covering flight software, autonomy features, MAVLink interfaces, cameras and pipelines.
• Make SITL/HITL, simulation, and bench testing first-class with scalable workflows.
• Stand up test infrastructure integrated with CI, nightly validation, and remote deployments.
• Validate multi-link connectivity, OTA updates, and cloud/backend integration.
• Capture logs, telemetry, video, and perception outputs and drive regression tests.
• Build dashboards and reports so releases are green and traceable.
• Lead and grow QA engineers across Turkey and Santa Clara and set coding standards.

Skills

Python scripting

Test automation leadership

Distributed systems debugging

English proficiency

Education

Bachelor's degree in Electrical/Computer Engineering or Computer Science

Tools

Docker

CI/CD

Job description

SQA (Software Quality Assurance) Lead

QUALITY ENGINEERING · FULL-TIME · ON-SITE — SANTA CLARA, CA

We are looking for a hands‑on SQA (Software Quality Assurance) Lead to anchor quality across the SiFly Aviation software stack and grow quality engineering into a first-class discipline as we scale toward production flight. This is a senior, deeply technical role: you will set the testing strategy, build the automation and end-to-end suites that gate our releases, and mentor a small, growing QA team spanning Turkey and Santa Clara — while staying close enough to the code and the aircraft to write and debug tests yourself.

About SiFly Aviation

At SiFly, we’re building a new category of aircraft: vertical-takeoff, long-endurance drones that deliver helicopter-level performance at drone economics. After thousands of flight tests and years of engineering, our NDAA-compliant platform flies more than 2 hours in hover or 3 hours in forward flight on a single charge — matching the capability of traditional helicopters at a fraction of their cost and operational burden. We merge aerial robotics, perception, and onboard intelligence to cut complexity and minimize human intervention, and our unique approach to communications and networking unlocks remote operations from day one. It’s an ambitious mission, and we’re a small team that moves fast.

The Role

You will own how SiFly Aviation decides a build is ready to fly. Today one QA engineer covers end-to-end system testing; you will take that foundation and turn it into a coherent quality practice — a shared definition of "release-ready," automated regression that runs on every change, and a simulation-and-bench workflow that lets any engineer trust a green result. You will do this primarily as a builder: designing and writing tests, standing up the infrastructure that runs them, and triaging the failures — while setting the standards and mentoring the engineers who join you.

The team is intentionally split by strength: one engineer focused on QA test-automation development and another on manual, end-to-end test execution, across Turkey and Santa Clara. You will shape how those roles work together, review their test plans, and grow the group into an organization that scales with the product.

What You’ll Do

• Own the QA strategy end-to-end. Define what "release-ready" means for the Q12, set pass/fail criteria and release gates, and make quality a measurable, non-negotiable part of the development and release workflow rather than a step at the end.

• Build the automated regression suites. Design and write automated tests covering flight software, autonomy features, MAVLink interfaces, camera and video pipelines (H.264/HEVC, WHIP/WHEP), the detect-and-avoid stack, telemetry, and operator workflows — and keep them fast and trustworthy enough to run on every change.

• Make simulation and bench testing first-class. Own the SITL/HITL test workflow and keep it faithful to real aircraft behavior; build scenario-based tests for takeoff and landing, mission execution, failsafes, detect-and-avoid, GPS degradation, sensor noise, comms delays, and the long tail of edge cases.

• Stand up the test infrastructure. Wire QA into CI so tests trigger automatically, run nightly and batch validation jobs, and deploy simulator and test instances locally and on remote servers so any engineer can run a meaningful test without booking aircraft time.

• Validate the full connected system. Test multi-link connectivity and failover (5G, Wi‑Fi 6, Wi‑Fi HaLow), OTA update and rollback via Mender, cloud/backend integration over MQTT and REST, and the Pilot, Crew, HQ, and Mobile apps against the embedded platform.

• Close the loop between real flights and the lab. Capture and organize logs, MAVLink and telemetry, video, and perception outputs; reproduce bugs seen in real flights as automated regression tests; and quantify where simulation diverges from reality in dynamics, sensors, timing, and control response.

• Make results legible. Build dashboards, log summaries, failure artifacts, and reports so a release lead can trust a green build — and so failures route quickly to the right owner.

• Lead and grow the team. Mentor the automation‑and manual‑focused QA engineers across Turkey and Santa Clara, review their test plans, set standards and coding practices for the group, and help hire as the QA organization expands.

• Partner across engineering. Work closely with flight software, embedded platform, autonomy, perception, and applications teams so QA is part of everyday development, not a downstream gate.

Required Experience

• Minimum 5+ years of professional experience in software quality assurance, test engineering, or a closely related field.

• A bachelor’s degree or higher in a related program — Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or similar.

• Senior QA / test engineering experience, with a track record of building automated test systems, CI pipelines, or QA infrastructure for complex software — and setting the practices around them.

• Strong Python for test automation, log analysis, orchestration, and tooling.

• Comfortable owning quality across a distributed system: debugging across processes, containers, networks, and hardware/software boundaries on Linux.

• Hands‑on experience with MAVLink, ROS, or comparable autopilot/robotics stacks — or the ability to demonstrate you can get there quickly.

• Direct experience with SITL, HITL, hardware‑in-the-loop, or hardware/software integration testing of robotic or embedded systems.

• Experience mentoring engineers, reviewing test plans, or otherwise leading quality work — formally or informally — for a team.

• Working knowledge of aircraft, robotics, or embedded behavior — sensors, control loops, coordinate frames, and timing/synchronization — enough to know when a test result is suspicious.

• Comfortable deploying and operating test services on remote machines and servers.

• Advanced English language skills and strong written and verbal communication — able to coordinate clearly across a distributed team in Turkey and Santa Clara.

Nice to Have

• Isaac Sim, Gazebo, AirSim, or game‑engine‑based simulators.

• Camera simulation, RTSP/GStreamer or WebRTC video testing.

• Docker and cloud‑based CI/CD.

• OTA testing (Mender) and Yocto/embedded Linux.

• XRCE‑DDS or DDS‑based robotics middleware.

• Prior sim‑to‑real correlation work.

• QA dashboards, log viewers, or failure‑triage tooling.

• Familiarity with UAV regulatory context (Remote ID, ADS‑B).

• Experience standing up or leading a QA function from an early stage.

• A valid SHGM (Turkish DGCA) remote‑pilot licence for the Q12’s İHA weight class — İHA1 (4–25 kg) or İHA2 (25–150 kg) depending on take‑off weight — ideally with beyond‑visual‑line‑of‑sight (BVLOS) operational authorization.

What Success Looks Like

• SiFly has a real QA organization with clear ownership — and a shared, trusted definition of what "ready to fly" means.

• Simulation and end-to-end tests gate every release, not just nightly, and any engineer can spin up a representative test locally or remotely in minutes.

• Field bugs land in the regression suite within days, not quarters, and stay fixed.

• Detect‑and‑avoid scenarios, camera end‑to‑end, connectivity failover, OTA updates, and operator actions are exercised safely and repeatably before any real flight.

• Flight logs, telemetry, video, and simulation outputs are stored, searchable, and replayable from one place.

• The QA engineers you lead are growing, unblocked, and trusted by the rest of engineering — and the team treats quality as something they rely on, not a demo.

Compensation & Logistics

• Gross salary range: $160K–$180K. Salaries are paid in USD.

• Job type: Remote contract‑based employment.

• Location: On‑site position in Santa Clara, CA — working closely with our Europe team.