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).
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