Flight Test Instrumentation & Data Engineer

The Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI) & Data Engineer will be responsible for the end-to-end handling, quality assurance, accessibility, and long-term management of all flight data. The primary objective is to ensure that full-aircraft data, from the onboard sensors and DAQ systems to the final processing tools, is available to every engineering team through a reliable, efficient, and standardized workflow.

Tasks

Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI) & DAQ Pipeline

- Manage the data pipeline from the physical sensor and Data Acquisition (DAQ) level for the full aircraft, ensuring seamless and accurate transmission into the telemetry and storage systems.

- Maintain sensor configuration, calibration records, and metadata to guarantee the accurate translation of raw physical signals into usable engineering units.

- Collaborate with hardware, software and integration teams to define sensor requirements, DAQ architectures, scaling, and telemetry bandwidth allocations.

- Troubleshoot and resolve data anomalies at the DAQ and sensor level (e.g., signal noise, dropouts, faulty scaling) before they propagate into downstream databases.

Data Infrastructure & Accessibility

- Maintain reliable extraction of flight data from InfluxDB.

- Develop and maintain standardized local data structures for analysis, plotting, and visualization.

- Optimize access to large flight datasets while minimizing CPU and memory usage.

- Design and maintain an efficient local storage solution for processed flight data.

- Support future improvements to the flight data architecture as storage requirements, sensor counts, and analysis needs continue to evolve.

Data Quality & Analysis Support

- Maintain derived datasets to ensure common calculations and signals are shared consistently across teams.

- Ensure strict timing synchronization and timestamp accuracy across all recorded data, from the sensor acquisition point to the database.

- Monitor data quality, completeness, and integrity throughout the entire pipeline.

- Provide fast data previews for rapid post-flight reviews.

- Enable efficient access to high-frequency sensor data for detailed engineering investigations.

- Support custom querying of processed datasets.

Requirements

Education & Experience

- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering, Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related technical field.

- 3+ years of professional experience in test instrumentation, data acquisition (DAQ), or sensor-to-database time-series data engineering (aerospace, automotive, or racing/motorsports preferred).

- Hands-on experience working directly with physical aircraft/vehicle sensor installations, DAQ hardware, and telemetry pipelines.

Technical & Domain Expertise

1. Hardware, Sensors & DAQ Architecture

- Strong understanding of physical sensors (e.g., strain gauges, accelerometers, thermocouples, pressure transducers, RTDs, LVDTs, pitot-static tubes).

- Demonstrated knowledge of signal conditioning, sampling rate selection, anti-aliasing filtering, scaling, and sensor calibration procedures.

2. Data Infrastructure & Software Development

- Proficient in Python or MATLAB for data analysis, automated data processing, and visualization library development (e.g., Pandas, NumPy, SciPy).

- Experience working with time-series databases, specifically InfluxDB (or similar engines), including writing efficient queries (Flux/InfluxQL) and data retrieval pipelines.

- Solid foundation in data structures and memory/CPU optimization when handling high-memory high-frequency continuous time-series datasets.

3. Data Integrity & Signal Processing

- Experience with timestamping and clock synchronization protocols across distributed DAQ hardware and storage nodes.

- Knowledge of basic digital signal processing (DSP) concepts (filtering, FFT, spectral analysis, decimation/resampling).

Soft Skills & Work Style

- Cross-functional communication: Ability to bridge the gap between hardware technicians, flight physics/aerodynamics engineers, and software teams.

- Detail-oriented mindset: Uncompromising rigor regarding calibration metadata, unit conversions, and data accuracy.

- Adaptability: Drive to continuously improve data infrastructure as aircraft sensor counts, test frequencies, and analytical needs expand.

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications

- Knowledge of standard FAA / EASA flight test instrumentation requirements or military flight test standards (e.g. IRIG 106).

- Familiarity with dashboarding tools (e.g., Grafana) for rapid post-flight previews and real-time telemetry display.

- Experience with version control systems (Git) and CI/CD pipelines for internal engineering tool distribution.

- Direct experience with DAQ systems and digital bus protocols (CAN bus, ARINC 429, MIL-STD-1553, Ethernet/UDP, PCM).

- Familiarity with binary flight data formats (e.g., IRIG 106 Chapter 10/11, MDF/MF4, HDF5, Parquet, or custom binary loggers).

- Experience with performing on-aircraft hardware troubleshooting (e.g., tracking down ground loops, signal noise, dropouts, or faulty scaling).