Flight Test Engineer

About Alteon

The Wright Brothers gave humanity flight, Alteon exists to give humanity (almost) perpetual
flight. Our mission is to build the world’s highest endurance aircrafts – ones that can fly for
up to ~417 days at a time.

We are a small, young team driven by pushing the limits of what’s possible – we don’t like
settling for good enough. We are here to build the best technology possible, the best
airplane possible, to do the best engineering possible. Limited only by the laws of physics.

About this role

As a flight test engineer at Alteon you’ll be responsible for pushing aircrafts to their limits to
find and communicate failure modes to the rest of the team. You’ll spend your time between
the field and the desk – designing test cases, flying airplanes and analyzing flight data. You
should have a deep appreciation for rigor and consistency, have a fundamental
understanding of how airplanes work and thrive in a fast-paced environment.

What you’ll do

– Design test cases to stress test the aircraft – define what to measure, how to
measure it and what counts as a meaningful result.
– Inspect newly built aircraft to serve as the final step of quality control and execute
maiden flights to qualify new builds.
– Build testing jigs, fixtures and processes to collect on-ground and in-flight data.
– Analyze flight data and communicate failure modes back to the rest of the
engineering team — structures, mechanical, avionics, propulsion — so they can act
on it.

Skills & competencies

– You have 1 year+ of fixed-wing flying experience.
– You can configure, tune, and run autonomous missions on ArduPilot or PX4.
– You have a first-principles understanding of how airplanes fly — aero, structures,
propulsion.
– You have gotten your hands dirty doing hands-on mechanical work building fixed
wing airplanes.
– You are comfortable working inside CAD software (Fusion 360 / Solidworks / etc).
– Bonus: if you have experience setting up and running tests in SITL.