Sr/Staff System Test and Validation Engineer

You will be a technical leader in a small, special-ops team of test engineers and technicians responsible for pathfinding new hardware and delivering environmental and durability campaigns for Zipline's major hardware categories. You will own the system-test roadmap for reliability validation and rapid fault finding, developing hardware and software to replicate in-flight stresses and monitor the vehicle. The team's fast discovery of hardware faults is core to Zipline's success and the velocity of hardware development and deployment.

Responsibilities

• Develop novel ways of replicating in-flight environments on the ground, including external factors (dust, ingress, icing), and internal vehicle stresses.
• Deeply understand the vehicle DFMEA and own the vehicle actuation during system test.
• Translate mission profiles into qualification and life-test plans, including accelerated test design, stress levels, and sample size justification. Stay ahead of aircraft profiles and load curves, to help unlock new capability.
• Develop health monitoring and anomaly detection software (Python, Rust) for aircraft and robotic systems, with emphasis on using the vehicle’s on-board telemetry.
• Drive the ‘rapid failure finding’ branch of the system test campaigns, a core input to design cycles and achieving maintenance goals.
• Build data pipelines and automated analysis tooling to adapt flight-software validators for system tests.
• Drive or develop directly the features needed in flight code to enable ‘Test Mode’ functionality.
• Integrate off-board sensors (cameras, airspeed sensors, other instrumentation) for continuous monitoring of vehicle health and tester health during long-duration tests.
• Conduct characterization of test assets, including developing analytical models and running instrumented test campaigns, to correlate test conditions to flight.
• - Drive decisions about test strategy overall: what new features are needed in system test, what should be tested at the system-level vs. component level vs. flight test. How to bring more coverage into system tests, and ways of rapid failure-finding.
• - Collaborate with the Reliability team to hone the strategy of long-duration vs. multiple vehicles being tested, as a function of the part-to-part variability and overall CapEx strategy.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience leading test engineers, equipment designers, and technicians for complex hardware programs.
• Experience planning and running environmental, durability, and reliability test campaigns that inform engineering decisions.
• Experience in reliability techniques including MTBF, Weibull analyses, and DFMEAs.
• Strong electromechanical skills in embedded controls, real-time compute, and actuation.
• Software proficiency (Python, Rust, C/C++)
• Electrical engineering fundamentals including battery systems, communications protocols, and RF systems.
• Strong hardware-debugging intuition and electrical troubleshooting skills for aircraft or similarly complex electromechanical systems.- Sound judgment to prioritize test capability, campaign scope, and fault investigations across multiple hardware programs.
• Excellent ability to ‘get unstuck’ and make progress in a complex and changing environment.
• Experience developing real-time controls in safety critical applications.