Senior SQA Lead - Flight Software & Autonomy

SiFly; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

SiFly Aviation is seeking a hands-on SQA Lead to anchor quality across the software stack for production flight. You will define release gates, build automation, and mentor a QA team spanning Turkey and Santa Clara while staying close to code and aircraft to write tests yourself.

This senior role requires strong Python, CI, and end-to-end test design, with a focus on SITL/HITL, MAVLink, and embedded systems.

Qualifications

• Minimum 5+ years in software quality assurance, test engineering, or closely related field.
• Bachelor's degree or higher in a related program — Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or similar.
• Senior QA / test engineering experience with automated test systems, CI pipelines, or QA infrastructure for complex software.
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Own the QA strategy end-to-end. Define release-ready criteria and gates.
• Build automated regression suites covering flight software, autonomy, MAVLink interfaces, and video pipelines.
• Lead SITL/HITL testing and real aircraft–like scenario tests.
• Stand up the test infrastructure; wire QA into CI so tests run nightly and on remote servers.
• Validate the full connected system: OTA, cloud/backend, MQTT/REST apps.
• Lead and grow the QA team across Turkey and Santa Clara; set standards and practices.
• Partner with flight software, embedded platform, autonomy, perception, and applications teams.

Skills

Python for test automation

CI pipelines

SITL/HITL testing

MAVLink

ROS

Leadership / mentoring

Linux debugging

Education

Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or similar

Tools

MAVLink

ROS

SITL tools

Docker

Job description

SiFly Aviation is seeking a hands-on SQA Lead to anchor quality across the software stack for production flight. You will define release gates, build automation, and mentor a QA team spanning Turkey and Santa Clara while staying close to code and aircraft to write tests yourself.

This senior role requires strong Python, CI, and end-to-end test design, with a focus on SITL/HITL, MAVLink, and embedded systems.