System Identification Engineer

Location: Lausanne, Switzerland; onsite

Employment: Full time

Company

hirify.global is a next-generation defense prime developing autonomous and scalable defense systems for allied forces.

What you will do

• Design and run system-identification experiments and flight tests, from excitation design through data collection.
• Identify rigid-body, aerodynamic, propulsion, and actuator dynamics using frequency-domain, time-domain, and closed-loop methods.
• Characterize motors, ESCs, propellers, and control surfaces, including bandwidth, delays, saturation, thermal effects, and battery effects.
• Build and maintain an automated, reproducible pipeline for flight-log ingestion, data-quality checks, estimation, validation, and reporting.
• Validate models against held-out flight data, quantify uncertainty, and deliver models for controller design, simulation, SITL, HITL, and learned guidance and control.
• Extend identification capabilities across multirotors, control-surface multirotors, fixed wings, tail-sitters, and missiles while collaborating with control, guidance, and embedded engineers.

Requirements

• Strong academic record and a degree in aerospace, control, mechanical engineering, or a related STEM field; practical experience is valued more than the specific degree.
• Proven experience identifying dynamic models of flying platforms from real data in both frequency and time domains, including closed-loop data challenges.
• Strong understanding of rigid-body dynamics, aerodynamic forces and moments, non-dimensionalization, stability modes, propulsion models, and control-model applications.
• Hands-on experience planning and running flight tests and working with raw, imperfect flight logs.
• Strong Python and scientific-computing skills, with the discipline to build reproducible tools.

Nice to have

• Experience with data quality, uncertainty quantification, and model validation.
• Experience moving between bench, field, and code, and presenting models and test results to engineers and senior stakeholders.
• Fixed-wing aerodynamic modeling; VTOL or tail-sitter dynamics; remote pilot certification; real flight logs; structural or vibration modes; or data-driven and learned dynamics models.
• Ability to mentor junior engineers and interns depending on seniority.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on high-impact autonomous defense technology in a demanding environment emphasizing rigor, ownership, execution, and technical excellence.
• Contribute to systems intended to provide a defensive edge to allied nations through ethical technology.
• Operate in a fast-paced environment with a hands-on, no-task-is-too-small mentality.
• Commitment to 100% dedication to hirify.global’s mission is expected.