Senior Flight Test Safety Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

About IWV

Iron Will Ventures is a defense engineering and technical services company supporting some of the Department of War's most challenging missile defense, hypersonic, flight test, and advanced technology programs. Guided by the philosophy of “I Will,” we help scale the defense industrial base through advanced testing, deep technical analysis, and resilient industrial ecosystems—accelerating the delivery of hypersonic, missile defense, and other critical national security capabilities. Our teams work alongside government program offices, laboratories, ranges, and industry partners to solve difficult technical and integration problems and accelerate capability from development through flight test and fielding.

Out Test. Out Analyze. Out Build.

Position Summary

Iron Will Ventures is seeking a Senior Flight Test Safety Engineer to perform technical analysis supporting advanced missile, hypersonic, target, and launch-system flight tests.

The position will focus primarily on the analytical foundations of flight safety —using vehicle performance data, trajectory simulations, Monte Carlo results, failure models, and debris characteristics to determine the risks associated with nominal and off-nominal flight.

The engineer will develop and evaluate flight-safety analyses used to support mission planning, test design, and flight authorization. This is a highly technical engineering and analysis position rather than a range-coordination role.

The ideal candidate has hands-on experience performing flight-safety, trajectory, debris, dispersion, or risk analysis for missiles, launch vehicles, targets, sounding rockets, hypersonic vehicles, or other high-energy flight systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Perform flight-safety analyses for developmental missile, hypersonic, target, launch-vehicle, and other advanced flight-test missions.
• Analyze nominal and off-nominal vehicle trajectories to identify potential hazards and quantify mission risk.
• Perform and evaluate Monte Carlo trajectory simulations incorporating vehicle performance dispersions, environmental effects, guidance uncertainties, and failure conditions.
• Develop and analyze vehicle failure models across applicable phases of flight.
• Conduct debris analyses to characterize fragment populations, ballistic behavior, impact distributions, and potential hazard areas.
• Generate debris footprints, impact probability distributions, hazard contours, and related flight-safety products.
• Calculate and assess quantitative risk metrics, including individual risk, collective risk, casualty expectation, and probability of impact.
• Evaluate trajectory dispersions and identify the vehicle, environmental, and modeling parameters that drive flight-safety risk.
• Perform sensitivity and uncertainty analyses to characterize confidence in flight-safety results.
• Evaluate the safety implications of vehicle configuration, trajectory, launch-condition, and mission-design changes.
• Support analysis of Flight Termination System effectiveness and termination criteria.
• Evaluate failure response timelines, termination points, and resulting debris or impact consequences.
• Develop technical inputs for Flight Safety Data Packages, Safety Assessment Reports, and other mission safety products.
• Review 3-DoF and 6-DoF trajectory models and simulation results for applicability to flight-safety analysis.
• Develop analytical tools and scripts to improve the speed, repeatability, and automation of flight-safety assessments.
• Perform independent verification and validation of flight-safety models, assumptions, inputs, and results.
• Conduct technical peer reviews of flight-safety analyses produced by government and industry teams.
• Support rapid re-analysis as vehicle configurations, trajectories, test objectives, or mission conditions evolve.
• Document analytical methodologies, assumptions, uncertainties, results, and technical conclusions in decision-quality engineering products.
• Support post-flight trajectory reconstruction and comparison of actual vehicle performance against pre-flight safety predictions.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Systems Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, or a related technical discipline.
• 10+ years of relevant engineering or analytical experience supporting aerospace, missile, launch vehicle, flight-test, or related systems.
• Demonstrated experience performing flight-safety, trajectory, debris, dispersion, risk, or related quantitative engineering analysis.
• Strong understanding of flight mechanics, vehicle trajectories, and statistical analysis.
• Experience working with Monte Carlo simulations and large sets of trajectory or vehicle-performance data.
• Experience analyzing nominal and off-nominal vehicle behavior.
• Ability to understand and evaluate complex engineering models, assumptions, uncertainties, and simulation results.
• Ability to independently develop technically rigorous analytical products and clearly communicate conclusions.
• U.S. citizenship.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a DoD security clearance.
  

Desired Qualifications

• Active DoD Secret, Top Secret, or TS/SCI clearance.
• 15+ years of missile, launch vehicle, hypersonic, target, or flight-test analysis experience.
• Direct experience performing range-safety or flight-safety analysis.
• Experience with debris modeling and debris-footprint generation.
• Experience calculating casualty expectation, individual risk, collective risk, probability of impact, or related flight-safety metrics.
• Experience developing or evaluating vehicle failure probability models.
• Experience with 3-DoF and/or 6-DoF trajectory simulations.
• Experience with Monte Carlo trajectory dispersion analysis.
• Experience with Flight Termination System analysis.
• Experience with missile-defense targets, hypersonic vehicles, sounding rockets, launch vehicles, or experimental flight systems.
• Familiarity with RCC flight-safety methodologies and applicable government flight-test safety standards.
• Familiarity with FAA Part 450 flight-safety analysis methodologies.
• Experience with MATLAB, Python, or similar analytical/programming environments.
• Experience with trajectory or mission-analysis tools such as POST, OTIS, TAOS, STK, or comparable government or industry tools.
• Experience developing automated or reusable analytical workflows for flight-test applications.
  

Travel

• Limited travel may be required

 

What We're Looking For

Iron Will is looking for an engineer who can get into the underlying data and determine what happens when the vehicle does not fly exactly as planned .

The successful candidate should be comfortable working with trajectory files, Monte Carlo populations, vehicle dispersions, failure probabilities, debris characteristics, and uncertainty—and turning those inputs into defensible flight-safety conclusions.

This is not primarily a range-coordination or mission-management position. It is a hands-on technical analysis role supporting the engineering decisions required to safely execute complex flight tests.

Why Iron Will Ventures

Iron Will brings together experienced test professionals, engineers, analysts, and program leaders who have spent their careers executing complex national-security programs. Our role is not simply to observe the process. We help our customers  plan the test, integrate the mission, identify the problems, drive them to resolution, execute successfully, and learn from the results.

Iron Will Ventures Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected status.