Zipline
Sr/Staff System Test and Validation Engineer
$165K–$230K
South San Francisco, California, USA +1 · Staff · Full-time · Posted Aug 19, 2026
- Location
- South San Francisco, California, USA
South San Francisco, California, United States
About the job
Leads system testing and reliability validation for autonomous aircraft, developing test methods, monitoring software, and tools to find hardware faults and inform design decisions.
What you'll do
- Develop ground-based tests that replicate flight environments and stresses; plan qualification and life-test campaigns.
- Build health-monitoring, anomaly-detection, and automated analysis software for aircraft and test systems.
- Set system-test strategy and lead rapid fault-finding, coordinating test coverage and reliability plans across hardware programs.
What they ask for
- Experience leading test engineers, equipment designers, and technicians on complex hardware programs.
- Experience planning and running environmental, durability, and reliability test campaigns.
- Experience with reliability techniques including MTBF, Weibull analyses, and DFMEAs.
- Strong electromechanical, embedded-controls, real-time-compute, and hardware-debugging skills; software proficiency in Python, Rust, and C/C++.
Pay
$165,000 - $230,000 USD base salary
Tools
Python, Rust, C/C++
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative