Senior Quality Assurance Engineer (USA)
- Dronedeploy
- Remote USA
Job Description
Team Overview
The Aerial Capture team builds the software that gets drones in the air and brings back high-quality data. We focus on drone integration, flight planning, and image capture - spanning the RC flight app, fully autonomous Dock drones, and the workflows that power them: RTK precision, terrain awareness, Livemaps, obstacle avoidance, stand counts, and more.
We move fast, we test in the field, and we're scaling autonomous dock operations to new customers and capture subjects every quarter. Quality isn't an afterthought here - it's what makes the next release feel easy.
The Aerial Capture team is moving fast — scaling dock drone deployments, testing cutting-edge hardware every day, and pushing quality standards higher with every release. If you want a QA role where you actually fly the drones and your work directly shapes what ships, this is it.
Role Summary
As Senior QA Engineer, you own the quality bar for everything the Aerial Capture team ships. You'll fly drones daily, define and run test programs, lead acceptance testing on high-risk workflows, and make sure every bug that matters gets caught before it reaches a customer.
This is a hands-on, field-first role. You'll be in the air regularly - regression flights, acceptance flights, ad hoc validation - and you'll be the person who knows the product better than anyone. You coordinate with our QA team, keep our regression suites sharp, and surface the metrics that give Product and Engineering real confidence at release time.
We're not looking for someone who waits to be told what to test. We want someone who's already thinking about the next edge case, the next regression risk, and the next way to reduce manual testing load without sacrificing coverage.
Work Environment
Remote, work from home (US-based). We are a remote-first team that stays synced through channels such as Slack, Google Meet, and shared documentation. Candidates located in the Mountain, Central, or Eastern time zones are preferred.
Travel 1–2 times per quarter to customer sites and/or field locations to run flight tests, validate workflows in real‑world conditions, and build firsthand context on jobsite operations.
AI tooling is a core part of how this role operates. You’ll use AI to accelerate test design, regression maintenance, bug triage, metrics analysis, and first‑pass bug resolution in code, treating AI as a default tool in your QA workflow rather than an occasional add‑on.
Responsibilities
Field testing - Daily drone flights for regression, acceptance, and validation. You need physical space to fly (e.g. 10+ acres accessible from your location) and the judgment to run a high-quality flight program on your own.
Test planning and execution - Define comprehensive test plans for new features and releases. Know the requirements better than the PM or EM. Catch edge cases before anyone else sees them.
QA team coordination - Design and schedule QA test programs, write clear plans and checklists, and reduce back-and-forth so QA is never the bottleneck.
Bug reporting quality - Own the bug reporting rubric (repro steps, severity, exposure, context, logs, media) and enforce it so triage is plug-and-play - no validation pass needed to understand a ticket.
Regression strategy - Manage Dock, Android, and iOS regression suites. Own the "regression found" playbook. Make sure the suites actually test user workflows and catch what matters.
Automated testing - Build and maintain automation to reduce manual testing load and increase confidence. AI-first approach to test setup, maintenance, and analysis.
Quality metrics - Track post-release bugs per feature, escalation patterns, QA throughput, and SLO-violating issues. Use them to improve processes and focus QA resources where they reduce risk most.
Equipment and environments - Maintain Qase suites, device/drone inventory, firmware tracking, and internal QA tooling. No fire drills because something wasn't set up.
Requirements
Space to fly - access to 10+ acres for daily drone operations (place of residence or nearby)
FAA Part 107 Certificate (required; can obtain upon hiring)
Hardware QA experience - you know how to validate hardware behavior end-to-end, not just software
4+ years in QA/quality engineering for hardware or mobile products
Automation mindset - you build automation to reduce manual load and ship with higher confidence
Proactive by default - you surface issues, risks, and blockers without being asked
Code/Scripting - Strong coding/scripting skills in Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, or similar
Test/Defect platforms - Experience with test case management (Qase or similar) and defect tracking (Jira)
Communication - Clear communicator who can write a concise bug ticket, run a crisp standup update, and coordinate a team
AI Tooling - AI is a core part of how this role works — not optional. You'll use AI tools for test setup and maintenance, bug analysis and triage, metrics review, and taking a first-pass at resolving new bug tickets in code. We expect candidates to already be using AI in their QA work and to be enthusiastic about pushing that further.
Experience testing mobile apps (Android/iOS) with frameworks like Appium, Espresso, or Detox
Familiarity with robotics, geospatial, or autonomous systems
CI/CD pipeline experience (GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Jenkins)
API and integration testing
Experience with drone flight systems, RTK/PPK workflows, or embedded firmware
