Flight Test Engineer (Aerospace)

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, on-site

Company

hirify.global develops and operates full-size autonomous cargo aircraft, including seaplane and STOL platforms designed to carry two tons of payload over more than a thousand nautical miles.

What you will do

• Plan and coordinate flight and ground test campaigns, including test plans, test cards, and functional hazard analyses.
• Direct ground runs, taxi tests, and envelope-expansion flight test events as a Test Director or Responsible Engineer.
• Monitor telemetry and process flight-test data to evaluate aircraft, propulsion, fuel-system, stability, control, and overall system performance.
• Define and support the installation of flight-test instrumentation, sensors, and data-acquisition systems.
• Coordinate with avionics, propulsion, flight-controls, structures, flight-sciences, and aircraft-configuration teams to establish validation criteria.
• Lead pre-flight briefings and post-test debriefs, enforce flight-line safety, troubleshoot anomalies, and document test results and airworthiness findings.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience as an experimental flight-test engineer, aerospace systems validation engineer, or UAS/aviation flight-operations specialist.
• Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent experience, with fixed-wing aircraft operations and performance familiarity.
• Experience creating flight-test cards, managing test configurations, and working in structured flight-test environments.
• Proficiency in MATLAB, Python, or similar scripting languages for processing and visualizing flight-log datasets.
• Knowledge of data-acquisition systems, telemetry hardware, sensor calibration, and hands-on troubleshooting of electrical, mechanical, or software issues.
• FAA Part 107 remote pilot certificate or private pilot’s license, plus aviation-standard VHF radio communication experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with heavy or large remotely operated vehicles and Group 3–5 autonomous UAS.
• Familiarity with FAA experimental certification, airworthiness standards, or MIL-STD test protocols.
• Basic CAD experience for test brackets, fixtures, or harness layouts.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive salary and meaningful early-stage equity.
• Relocation support where applicable.
• Employee health benefit plans and 6% retirement matching.
• Flexible paid time off.
• Free lunches, snacks, a stocked office fridge, and AI tools and subscriptions.
• Outdoor work at active test ranges under varying weather conditions.