Data Engineer - Flight Data (contract)

Team: General Engineering

Location: Palo Alto, CA

Commitment: Contract

Workplace Type: onsite

Responsibilities

• Pipeline development: Build and maintain the ingest and transformation pipelines that land aircraft telemetry from S3 into the flight data warehouse (AWS Glue, Athena), including schema evolution as firmware logging changes.
• Data modeling: Design and maintain curated marts — flight runs, component flight hours, vehicle modes, battery flight features — in SQL, with clear grain, documented lineage, and idempotent incremental refresh.
• Fleet alerting services: Develop and operate the Python services that evaluate flight-by-flight health checks and deliver alerts to engineering and customer-facing channels via SNS and Slack.
• Data quality: Own the automated quality gates — mart freshness, source-to-mart reconciliation, and watermark integrity — and block deploys that would publish incorrect fleet data.
• Analytics enablement: Build the dashboards and query interfaces engineering teams use to monitor the fleet, and convert repeated one-off analyses into supported datasets.
• Collaboration: Work directly with firmware, GNC, battery, systems engineering, flight operations, and MRO to define what gets logged, what gets alerted on, and what “good” looks like for each signal.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer/Electrical Engineering, or a related technical discipline
• 3+ years of professional data engineering experience building and operating production pipelines
• Strong SQL, including window functions and query tuning on a distributed, columnar engine (Athena/Trino/Presto, Spark, Snowflake, or BigQuery)
• Proficient in Python for production services — not just notebooks: packaging, dependency management, unit tests, and code review
• Hands-on experience with the AWS data stack: S3, Glue, Athena, Lambda, SNS, CloudWatch, and IAM
• Dimensional modeling and warehouse design, including partitioning strategy for large tables
• Excellent analytical and written communication skills, with the ability to work across multidisciplinary teams

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of relevant data engineering experience, including ownership of an on-call or operationally critical data system
• Infrastructure as code with Terraform, and building deployment pipelines in GitLab CI or equivalent
• Transformation frameworks such as dbt, and data quality/testing frameworks
• High-volume time-series or sensor telemetry, and observability tooling (Grafana, CloudWatch, or similar), including alert design that avoids alarm fatigue
 
Familiarity/experience with one or more of the following:
• Aerospace, automotive, or robotics telemetry and flight/vehicle test data
• Embedded logging formats and decoding raw device logs (CAN, serial, or proprietary binary packet formats)
• FAA aircraft certification or continued airworthiness processes
• Interest in RC planes, quadcopters, or aviation

Attributes aligned with Core Values

Safety Above All: Demonstrates a proactive safety mindset by embedding safety into daily work, identifying and mitigating risks, encouraging open dialogue about safety concerns, and continuously improving practices and protocols.
Customer Focus: Puts customers at the center of every action by understanding their challenges, delivering meaningful value, and supporting their success.
Work Better Together: Seeks and values diverse perspectives, builds cross-functional relationships, and fosters trust through empathetic, fact-based communication and commitment to shared decisions.
Be the Pilot: Drives results with clarity and purpose by focusing on what matters most, adapting to change, taking initiative, and owning outcomes.
Embrace the Unknown: Navigates ambiguity with resilience and bold thinking, challenges the status quo, and combines innovative ideas with practical approaches to overcome obstacles and drive progress.
Respect for People: Fosters a high-performance culture grounded in respect, professionalism, and support by balancing high expectations with a healthy, collaborative environment and being a trusted, dependable teammate.