Senior Flight Test Engineer – Autonomy & Validation

Shieldai; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 185,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI is seeking an experienced Senior Engineer, Flight Test to develop and execute comprehensive flight test strategies for validating autonomous behaviors and system performance. You will work with software, hardware, and product teams to reproduce real-world mission scenarios, identify issues, and improve quality and reliability of the Hivemind platform.

You will also build tooling and mentor engineers to establish testing best practices.

Qualifications

• Minimum 5 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 4 years and a Master’s degree; or equivalent work experience.
• Proficiency in software quality engineering, test automation, and programming with Python and C++.
• Experience planning and executing field or flight testing for robotics, autonomous systems, or complex software platforms.
• Experience developing automated test tooling, validation frameworks, or data analysis tools.
• Demonstrated experience designing, documenting, executing, and tracking test plans, test cases, and software defects.

Responsibilities

• Develop and execute flight test plans that validate new autonomy capabilities, software integrations, and system performance in real-world flight environments.
• Design and execute test scenarios that reproduce operational customer workflows and mission conditions to identify software defects, integration issues, and performance limitations.
• Build analysis tools and validation workflows that improve test coverage, accelerate regression testing, and reduce time to identify issues.
• Review flight logs, telemetry, rosbags, and system data to triage issues, perform root-cause analysis, and collaborate with engineering teams to drive resolution.
• Work closely with middleware, autonomy, and integration teams to develop complementary test strategies, share tooling, and improve overall product quality.
• Provide technical guidance to junior engineers, establish testing standards, and help improve engineering processes across the organization.
• Maintain standard operating procedures, participate in flight operations, and contribute to the continuous improvement of testing processes and operational readiness.

Skills

Python

C++

Test automation

Software quality

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

Job description

Shield AI is seeking an experienced Senior Engineer, Flight Test to develop and execute comprehensive flight test strategies for validating autonomous behaviors and system performance. You will work with software, hardware, and product teams to reproduce real-world mission scenarios, identify issues, and improve quality and reliability of the Hivemind platform.

You will also build tooling and mentor engineers to establish testing best practices.