SQA Lead

SiFly•Santa Clara, CA

13h•Onsite

About The Position

SiFly Aviation is seeking a hands-on, technically focused Software Quality Assurance Lead to establish quality engineering practices across its software stack as the company scales toward production flight. The role owns the definition of release readiness for the Q12 aircraft, including pass/fail criteria, release gates, automated regression, and simulation and bench-testing workflows. The lead will build and debug tests, test infrastructure, and failure-triage processes while mentoring a small, distributed QA team in Turkey and Santa Clara. The position focuses on software and system quality for an aircraft platform incorporating flight software, autonomy, perception, communications, onboard intelligence, cloud services, and operator applications. The lead will develop automated tests and CI integration; oversee software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop workflows; validate connected systems and OTA updates; and connect real-flight findings to repeatable regression tests. The role also works closely with flight software, embedded platform, autonomy, perception, and applications teams to embed QA in everyday development. The job posting describes the position as full-time and on-site in Santa Clara, California, while also listing the job type as remote contract-based employment. It gives a gross salary range of $160,000–$180,000, paid in USD.

Requirements

At least 5 years of professional experience in software quality assurance, test engineering, or a closely related field.
Bachelor’s degree or higher in a related field such as Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or Computer Science.
Senior QA or test-engineering experience building automated test systems, CI pipelines, or QA infrastructure for complex software, and establishing the practices around them.
Strong Python skills for test automation, log analysis, orchestration, and tooling.
Ability to own quality across distributed systems and debug across processes, containers, networks, and hardware/software boundaries on Linux.
Hands-on experience with MAVLink, ROS, or comparable autopilot/robotics stacks, or the ability to demonstrate that these can be learned quickly.
Direct experience with SITL, HITL, hardware-in-the-loop, or hardware/software integration testing of robotic or embedded systems.
Experience mentoring engineers, reviewing test plans, or otherwise leading quality work, formally or informally.
Working knowledge of aircraft, robotics, or embedded behavior, including sensors, control loops, coordinate frames, and timing/synchronization, sufficient to identify suspicious test results.
Comfort deploying and operating test services on remote machines and servers.
Advanced English language skills and strong written and verbal communication skills for coordinating across a distributed team in Turkey and Santa Clara.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Isaac Sim, Gazebo, AirSim, or game-engine-based simulators.
Camera simulation or RTSP/GStreamer or WebRTC video testing experience.
Docker and cloud-based CI/CD experience.
OTA testing with Mender and Yocto or embedded Linux experience.
Experience with XRCE-DDS or DDS-based robotics middleware.
Prior simulation-to-real correlation work.
Experience building QA dashboards, log viewers, or failure-triage tooling.
Familiarity with UAV regulatory context, including Remote ID and ADS-B.
Experience establishing or leading a QA function from an early stage.
A valid SHGM (Turkish DGCA) remote-pilot licence for the Q12’s İHA weight class—İHA1 (4–25 kg) or İHA2 (25–150 kg), depending on take-off weight—ideally with beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) operational authorization.

Responsibilities

Own the QA strategy and define release-readiness criteria, pass/fail standards, and release gates for the Q12.
Design, write, maintain, and run automated regression tests for flight software, autonomy, MAVLink interfaces, camera and video pipelines, detect-and-avoid, telemetry, and operator workflows.
Own and improve software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop testing workflows, keeping simulation representative of real aircraft behavior.
Build scenario-based tests for takeoff and landing, mission execution, failsafes, detect-and-avoid, GPS degradation, sensor noise, communications delays, and edge cases.
Integrate QA into CI, configure automatic test execution, run nightly and batch validation jobs, and deploy simulator and test instances locally and on remote servers.
Validate connectivity and failover across 5G, Wi-Fi 6, and Wi-Fi HaLow; OTA updates and rollback via Mender; MQTT and REST cloud/backend integration; and the Pilot, Crew, HQ, and Mobile apps against the embedded platform.
Capture and organize flight logs, MAVLink and telemetry data, video, and perception outputs; reproduce field issues as automated regression tests; and measure simulation-to-reality differences in dynamics, sensors, timing, and control response.
Create dashboards, log summaries, failure artifacts, and reports that make test results understandable and direct failures to the appropriate owners.
Mentor QA engineers focused on automation and manual end-to-end testing across Turkey and Santa Clara; review test plans, establish team standards and coding practices, and help hire as the QA organization expands.
Partner with flight software, embedded platform, autonomy, perception, and applications teams to make QA part of everyday development.