Simulation Engineering Manager, UAS Platform

Firestorm; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 175,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision plans

401(k) retirement savings

Equity grants

Unlimited PTO

Parental Leave

Job summary

Firestorm is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead the Simulation team, building the software, infrastructure, and tools used to develop, test, train, and demonstrate Firestorm aircraft. You will own an existing simulation capability and grow it into a reusable UAS simulation platform.

You will support interactive developer workflows, automated SIL/HIL testing, scenario orchestration, and mission demonstrations across Firestorm aircraft and variants, while growing the team of engineers.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software, simulation, robotics, or related engineering experience.
• 3+ years leading software engineering teams.
• U.S. person required due to ITAR regulations.
• Hands-on experience building or integrating simulation systems for aircraft, UAS, robotics, or other complex physical systems.
• Experience with Gazebo,JSBSim,AirSim,FlightGear, or similar simulation frameworks.
• Strong C++ and Python or similar software engineering experience.
• Experience with SIL, HIL, or other integrated simulation environments.
• Experience integrating flight software, vehicle models, sensors, actuators, or hardware interfaces into simulation.
• Strong build, packaging, deployment, and distribution of applications across multiple OS.
• Experience building automated, reproducible simulation or test environments.
• Demonstrated ability to debug complex problems across simulation, software, networking, and hardware boundaries

Responsibilities

• Lead the Simulation team: own aircraft simulation infrastructure, tools, models, and integrations.
• Build the simulation platform: reusable capability across aircraft, payloads, sensors, propulsion, and compute configurations.
• Enable software development and test: interactive and headless environments for aircraft software teams and automated SIL/HIL tests.
• Build scenario orchestration: tools for defining, configuring, executing, and replaying aircraft and mission scenarios.
• Scale simulation execution: infrastructure for local, CI, and distributed simulation runs.
• Integrate the aircraft stack: connect flight software, autonomy, vehicle models, sensors, actuators, and other aircraft systems into simulation.
• Support training and demonstrations: simulate scenarios for operator training and mission development.
• Grow the team: hire and develop engineers with strong simulation, software, and UAS fundamentals.

Skills

Software engineering

Team leadership

ITAR compliance

Simulation systems

Simulation frameworks

C++/Python

SIL/HIL

Flight software integration

Automation testing

Cross-domain debugging

Tools

PX4

ArduPilot

MAVLink

Job description

Firestorm is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead the Simulation team, building the software, infrastructure, and tools used to develop, test, train, and demonstrate Firestorm aircraft. You will own an existing simulation capability and grow it into a reusable UAS simulation platform.

You will support interactive developer workflows, automated SIL/HIL testing, scenario orchestration, and mission demonstrations across Firestorm aircraft and variants, while growing the team of engineers.