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Harmattan AI is a next-generation defense prime building autonomous and scalable defense systems. Following a $200M Series B at $1.4B valuation, the company is expanding teams to deliver mission-critical systems to allied forces.
You will take ownership of how Harmattan validates its autonomy and flight-software stack. Currently, software validation relies heavily on real hardware testing, which consumes airframes, range time, and crew while sampling only a handful of nominal trajectories. Critical edge cases—degraded GNSS, sensor dropout, electronic warfare, multi-agent scenarios—are rarely reached economically. Your mission is to establish the scenario library, execution strategy, and interface architecture to transform the existing simulation platform into a fast, reliable, continuous validation engine.
This is a senior, hands-on technical leadership role. You will lead an active team of four engineers across Paris and Lausanne, with a target of eight by mid-2027. Beyond team leadership, you become the technical authority on scenario-based testing: defining what runs across SITL, HITL, and CI, holding critical technical boundaries with adjacent teams, and bridging the gap between simulation fidelity and real flight data.
Key responsibilities:
- Team Leadership & Strategy: Structure and mandate the existing four-person team; build the roadmap to scale to eight by mid-2027.
- Scenario & Simulation Engineering: Design a versioned scenario library covering nominal, edge, off-nominal, and contested flight conditions; expand into Monte Carlo and multi-agent testing; bring a team with limited simulation experience up the learning curve.
- Execution Strategy & Gating: Establish test coverage across SITL, HITL, and CI; define gating policies, telemetry capture, deterministic replay, and coverage analytics.
- Interface & Boundary Ownership: Negotiate and maintain strong technical boundaries with the Tooling team (simulation platform) and co-ownership splits with Validation (acceptance criteria and final sign-off).
- Sim-to-Real Correlation: Correlate simulation models against real flight data to continuously measure and close the sim-to-real gap, ensuring green test gates reflect real-world flight readiness.
You will work closely with Tooling, Validation, GNC, Perception, and Embedded Software teams to shape the future of flight-software reliability. The role is based in Paris or Lausanne with travel between sites; working-level English required.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years in automated testing, simulation-based validation, or test engineering for complex physical/hardware-in-the-loop systems (e.g., Autonomous Driving, Aerospace, Defense, Robotics).
- Hands-on experience designing scenario-based test suites on a simulation platform and defining coverage that genuinely catches defects.
- Hands-on proficiency in Python, C++, Linux, Docker, and CI environments, with deep domain expertise in scenario design, SITL/HITL execution, and simulation tools.
- Proven ability to step into an existing engineering team, establish immediate clarity, and manage distributed engineers (Paris and Lausanne) effectively, including engineers more senior than you in years of experience.
- Rigorous, analytical approach to noisy physical metrics, false positives, and flaky test environments; instinctive questioning of what a passing test proves.
- Track record of defining and holding clear interfaces with platform providers and internal customer teams.
- Bonus: Background in defense/aerospace flight software, control systems, or experience closing sim-to-real fidelity gaps.
