Zipline
Head of Autonomous Flight Test Engineering
$200K–$280K
South San Francisco, California, USA +1 · Director · Full-time · Posted Jul 21, 2026
- Location
- South San Francisco, California, USA
South San Francisco, California, United States - Experience
- 5+ years designing, developing, validating, or testing complex autonomous, robotic, aerospace, aviation, or safety-critical systems.
About the job
Leads autonomous flight test engineering to validate aircraft, software, operations, and fleet systems and provide evidence for safe commercial release decisions.
What you'll do
- Lead and develop the Flight Test Engineering team and own validation strategy and test campaigns.
- Set campaign objectives, success criteria, and go/no-go frameworks with cross-functional partners; deliver release-readiness evidence.
- Improve test automation, data analysis, and validation practices, and partner with Flight Test Operations on site readiness and safe execution.
What they ask for
- Experience leading flight test, system test, validation, or field test engineering teams while remaining technically engaged.
- Experience taking complex test campaigns from objectives through planning, execution, analysis, and release recommendations.
- Systems-level judgment across software, embedded, electrical, mechanical, controls, operations, and regulatory constraints.
- Experience building or integrating test automation, analytics tooling, data pipelines, or scalable validation systems.
Nice to have
- UAS experience is strongly preferred.
Pay
$200,000-$280,000 USD base salary (starting cash range)
Tools
software-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative