About Us
Harmattan AI is a next-generation defense prime building autonomous and scalable defense systems. Following the close of a $200M Series B, valuing the company at $1.4 billion, we are expanding our teams and capabilities to deliver mission-critical systems to allied forces.
Our work is guided by clear values: building technologies with real-world impact, pursuing excellence in everything we do, setting ambitious goals, and taking on the hardest technical challenges. We operate in a demanding environment where rigor, ownership, and execution are expected.
About the Role
As a Software Test & Validation Engineer, you build the systems that let us trust our drones' software before it ever flies a mission. You design the automated tests and pipelines that put our flight software through its paces, from pure simulation (SITL) to hardware-in-the-loop (HITL), and turn the results into clear signal for the engineering teams. Our validation team is scaling fast, from testing a handful of drones to testing them by the hundred, and you are how that scale becomes possible.
Your main instrument is the SITL/HITL simulation environment built by our tooling team. A big part of the job is to use it to its full potential and to help improve it continuously: it's recent and not yet fully representative of reality, so your feedback and contributions are what will make it a trustworthy test bench. On top of that, new systems to validate arrive on a regular basis, so you'll repeatedly stand up test coverage for platforms you're seeing for the first time.
This is a broad role, and we're deliberately hiring for a range of profiles rather than a single narrow one. We're looking for engineers with scope beyond pure software, system-level thinking, a feel for architecture, a statistical approach to noisy data, and some physical intuition. Depending on your strengths, you might focus on test-scenario design and coverage, on the automation and CI pipeline that runs tests on every build, on capturing and replaying flight telemetry, or on deepening the simulation itself. Tell us in your application where you fit best.
What you'll do (the mix depends on your profile, you won't do all of it)
Test design & content: Define the scenarios that catch real bugs, decide what to measure, and turn noisy flight metrics into stable, meaningful pass/fail and regression signals.
Drive and improve the SITL/HITL environment: Use the tooling team's simulation bench as your primary test instrument, push it hard, and feed back concrete improvements to make it more representative, models, scenarios, missing capabilities.
Automation & tooling: Write clean Python tools to load, parse and analyse test outputs, detect regressions, and produce reports the engineering teams act on.
CI/CD integration: Integrate simulation and hardware tests into the continuous-integration pipeline so every new build is validated automatically, fast, and reproducibly.
Onboard new systems: As new platforms arrive, build the test scenarios, metrics and coverage to validate them, often starting from scratch.
Telemetry & replay: Capture flight and test telemetry and make it replayable and analysable, so an issue seen once can be reproduced and understood.
What we're looking for (we don't expect every point, show us your strengths)
Background in software engineering, embedded systems, mechatronics, aerospace, or a closely related field.
Strong Python for test tooling and automation (C++ is a plus, and more important for some of these profiles than others).
Scope beyond pure coding: system-level thinking, an ability to grasp a whole architecture, a statistical mindset for noisy test data, and enough physical intuition to reason about flight behaviour.
Some combination of: test-scenario/framework design; CI/CD and DevOps tooling (Docker, Jenkins/GitLab CI, Git, Linux); simulation (SITL/HITL); or telemetry capture and analysis.
A validation mindset: rigor, attention to edge cases, and healthy scepticism about what "passing" really means.
Clear communication and ownership, you'll work hand in hand with the flight-software, simulation/tooling and hardware teams.
Bonus: a background in drones or robotics; experience with statistical analysis of noisy test data.
We look forward to hearing how you can help shape the future of autonomous defense systems at Harmattan AI.