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. 

This role is full time, in-person at our facility in Bidarahalli, Bangalore.