Flight Test Instrumentation & Data Engineer

About the role

The Flight Test Instrumentation & Data Engineer is responsible for end‑to‑end handling, quality assurance, and long‑term management of all flight data, ensuring reliable, efficient, and standardized access for engineering teams.

Key responsibilities

• Manage the full‑aircraft data pipeline from sensors and DAQ hardware through telemetry to storage systems.
• Maintain sensor configurations, calibration records, and metadata to guarantee accurate engineering units.
• Collaborate with hardware, software and integration teams on sensor requirements, DAQ architecture, scaling and bandwidth allocation.
• Troubleshoot data anomalies at the sensor and DAQ level before they reach downstream databases.
• Maintain reliable extraction of flight data from InfluxDB and develop standardized local data structures for analysis and visualization.
• Optimize access to large high‑frequency datasets while minimizing CPU and memory usage.
• Ensure strict timing synchronization and timestamp accuracy across the entire data pipeline.
• Provide fast data previews for rapid post‑flight reviews and support custom querying of processed datasets.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering, Computer Science, Data Engineering or related field.
• 3+ years of professional experience in test instrumentation, DAQ or sensor‑to‑database time‑series engineering (aerospace, automotive or motorsports preferred).
• Hands‑on experience with physical aircraft/vehicle sensor installations, DAQ hardware and telemetry pipelines.

Required skills

• Python or MATLAB for data analysis and automation.
• Data‑analysis libraries such as Pandas, NumPy and SciPy.
• Time‑series databases, especially InfluxDB, and query languages Flux/InfluxQL.
• Strong knowledge of physical sensors (strain gauges, accelerometers, thermocouples, pressure transducers, etc.) and signal conditioning.
• Experience with digital bus protocols (CAN bus, ARINC 429, MIL‑STD‑1553, Ethernet/UDP).
• Familiarity with binary flight‑data formats (IRIG 106, MDF/MF4, HDF5, Parquet).
• Basic digital signal processing concepts (filtering, FFT, spectral analysis, decimation).
• Version control (Git) and CI/CD pipelines for engineering tools.