Simulation & Automation Team Lead

Description

Airobotics is a leading company specializing in the development and manufacturing of autonomous drone systems. Its solutions combine hardware, software, and AI-driven technologies to support complex, large-scale operations. Airobotics works primarily with defense industries, including military and law enforcement agencies worldwide. The company is part of Ondas Holdings and operates as a wholly owned subsidiary.

We build the software platform behind autonomous drone operations: a cloud backend, a ground control application, and onboard software running on the drone's companion computer alongside the flight controller.

We are looking for a Simulation & Automation Team Lead to own how this system is validated before it flies. You will lead the team that builds our simulation environments, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) rigs, and the automated test frameworks and quality gates that run on top of them.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will lead simulation and automation engineers as one team with one mission: make any mission, failure, or edge case testable repeatably and at scale, without waiting for a drone and a field day. You will set the company's quality strategy and still write code.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of simulation and automation engineers
• Define the company's test strategy: what is covered by unit tests, simulation, HIL, and real flight, and who owns each layer
• Own the simulation stack: software-in-the-loop (SITL) for the flight controller and high-fidelity 3D environments for sensors, physics, and the world
• Integrate simulation with the full software stack so the backend, ground control, and onboard software run against a simulated drone exactly as they do against a real one
• Design and own HIL infrastructure that brings real onboard computers, flight controllers, and sensors into automated test flows
• Own the automation frameworks for backend, UI, onboard, and end-to-end testing, including mission execution, degraded links, and failure injection
• Embed simulation, HIL, and automated tests into CI/CD, and define the quality gates a build must pass to reach a release and a vehicle
• Build the tooling that makes simulation and testing easy for every engineer: scenario authoring, local runs, replay, and debugging
• Report on quality: coverage, pass rates, escaped defects, and pipeline stability
• Drive a quality-first engineering culture across R&D, DevOps, and Product

Requirements

• 6+ years in software engineering, with significant time in simulation, test automation, or both
• 2+ years leading engineers as a team lead or tech lead
• Strong programming skills in Python and C++
• Proven experience building test automation frameworks from scratch and running them in CI
• Hands-on experience with simulation environments, game engines, or physics-based systems
• Experience with CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or similar) and Docker/Kubernetes
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, real-time systems, and system architecture
• Strong communication skills and the ability to define and defend a test strategy across teams

  Nice To Have

• Hands-on experience with NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Gazebo, AirSim, Unreal Engine, or Unity
• Experience with PX4 or ArduPilot SITL and MAVLink
• Experience with ROS 2 or DDS
• Experience designing or operating hardware-in-the-loop rigs
• Experience with UI automation tools such as Playwright
• Experience modeling sensors (camera, lidar, GNSS, IMU), physics, or environments
• Experience with robotics, drones, or autonomous systems, ideally in a safety- or mission-critical context

  What Makes This Role Unique

• Own both halves of validation, the virtual world and the tests that run in it, as one team
• First lead for this function: you define the simulation and test strategy for the whole company
• Direct impact on the safety and reliability of autonomous aerial operations