Voltair (YC W26) Is Hiring a Test Flight Engineer

Flight Test Engineer at Voltair | Y Combinator

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. With our ground stations and long range drones, we can cover the continental U.S. with only ~5000 stations. 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. After working for a power utility, Hayden realized the great challenge utilities faced in maintaining and repairing thousands of assets across large land areas. Oftentimes a utility only knew of issues after the fault occurred, which is a problem because - with extremely high voltage - a physically small maintenance concern can easily cascade to massive wildfires. Ronan, after building drones for DARPA, knew drones were the right technology to solve this observability problem. After working together on a prior drone startup, Ronan brought in Warren to lead operations. Needing to sell to the government, Warren brought in Avi who had experience in aerospace lobbying. The founders are all childhood friends. 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 be responsible for turning our prototypes into production grade vehicles, ready to service customer contracts. 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 2 months. 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 management Nice to Have - Manned aviation experience (private pilot or higher) - Experience running structured flight test plans or test campaigns - FAA Part 107 licensed