Flight Test Engineer

About Voltair

Autonomous Drones for Earth Observation

Tech

Our drones recharge inductively from power lines by harvesting the magnetic field with a current transformer. We build custom drones with COTS parts. We collect visual and thermal data. Soon we'll fly our drones BVLOS over LTE, but today our field technicians collect data on-site. We run this data through a MV pipelines and then deliver the GIS and PDF reports to our customers. Our Hardest Challenges - Performant recharging on distribution lines - Drone weather hardening & reliability - Tele-operations & autonomy - Mission planning with (1) range / recharge locations (stochastic!) (2) weather (3) FAA and other compliance constraints + traveling inspector problem - Cost effective uplink & data management / MV on the edge

The role

**About Voltair**Voltair is building the world’s first distributed network of drones for earth observation. We envision a world where after a major storm, an operator of critical infrastructure can simply sign into our platform and dispatch a drone. Within minutes, we will identify high risk hazards and stream issues directly to crews on the ground. We serve power utilities, hyper scalers, wildland firefighting and DOTs. With our long range drones, we can achieve autonomous coverage of the entire continental U.S. with \~5000 ground installations.We operate as a full stack service, meaning we build drones, deploy them, capture data, analyze it, and deliver the results on our software platform. Our first market is power utilities. We’ve serviced multiple utilities already, and are preparing for our biggest deployment with a large multinational utility later this year.**The Role**We’re looking for a Flight Test Engineer who is equally comfortable soldering a wiring harness on the bench and operating a 54lb fixed-wing aircraft in the field. This is not a pure R&D flight-test role and it's not a pure operations role, it's both. You'll build and validate the test fixtures and hardware that keep our flying robots reliable, and you'll deploy with that same hardware to fly real missions for large enterprise customers. You'll work closely with our hardware, software, and operations teams, and you'll be one of the people customers see in the field representing Voltair. We expect this role to travel about \~1 week every month. You’ll be the 7th full time employee of Voltair. On day 1 we’ll begin transitions of all flight testing responsibilities from our CEO to you. Drone manufacturing will follow shortly thereafter. Within 90 days of your arrival, we expect you’ll be deploying our drone for customer contracts. \\**Qualifications & Experiences**Required* Has built drones in hobby or professional setting and understands electrical systems on drones* Experience with autopilot firmware (ArduPilot, PX4, or similar)* 1+ years of related professional experience * Good instincts for airmanship and risk managementNice to Have* Manned aviation experience (private pilot or higher)* Experience running structured flight test plans or test campaigns* FAA Part 107 licensed