Senior Test and Automation Engineer

Senior Test and Automation Engineer

Playa Vista, California, United States

Turning Space into a Transportation Layer for Earth

Who We Are:

Inversion builds advanced reentry systems to deliver next-generation capabilities from space. Our mission is to make Earth radically more accessible by turning Low-Earth Orbit into an on-demand logistics domain. We see space not as a destination, but as a platform — one that unlocks unprecedented speed and global reach. Our spacecraft are designed to deliver payloads anywhere on Earth in under an hour, operating through extreme reentry conditions and landing with high precision. These systems open the door to new ways of testing, delivering, and operating at hypersonic speeds. Inherently dual-use, our technology is built to meet urgent national security needs while laying the groundwork for future commercial applications. Backed by leading investors including Y Combinator, Spark Capital, and Lockheed Martin Ventures, and working with partners such as the U.S. Space Force and NASA, Inversion is pushing the boundaries of what's possible in space-based defense and logistics.

About the Role

As a Senior Test and Automation Engineer at Inversion, you will work as part of the simulation team to build, test, maintain, and develop the automated hardware systems that support the simulation and test environments for our flight systems. The simulation team is responsible for ensuring that flight software and flight hardware can be continuously integrated and tested under realistic flight conditions. You will play a key role in the automation of electrical ground support equipment (EGSE) and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test benches that will enable fast, repeatable development and deployment workflows across the engineering stack. Your work will empower Inversion's engineering teams to iterate rapidly throughout the development life cycle and will strengthen Inversion's ability to put our products into the hands of our customers with unprecedented speed and agility.

What You'll Do

• Automate provisioning, deployment, execution, operation, and logging tasks to optimize resource utilization and allocation
• Develop emulators for flight hardware to support hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing
• Install and maintain servers, electrical ground support equipment (EGSE), and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test benches to support simulation workflows
• Perform preventative maintenance and troubleshooting to maximize simulation system availability
• Calibrate equipment to ensure simulation system performance
• Contribute to the design and development of a simulation system capable of automatically provisioning and deploying resources to support simulation workflows

Required Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional experience in testing and automation of electrical ground support equipment (EGSE) and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) systems
• Proficiency in one or more scripting languages (Python, Lua, Bash, PowerShell, etc.)
• Proficiency in one or more embedded languages (C/C++, Rust, etc.)
• Proficiency in the integration and testing of mission- and safety-critical electronics
• Experience with Linux-based systems

Desired Qualifications

• Experience with modern DevOps practices
• Experience with async and multithreaded architectures
• Experience with data acquisition and logging
• Familiarity with time-series databases (InfluxDB, QuestDB, TimescaleDB, Prometheus, etc.)
• Familiarity with message-oriented middleware (NATS, Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.)
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker, Docker Compose, etc.)
• Familiarity with system observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, etc.)

Our office headquarters is located in Playa Vista, CA. This position requires in office presence.