About Stillvale Flight Sciences

Stillvale was founded by engineers who came up through unmanned-systems test programs and went out on their own. The firm exists to do the kind of careful autonomy-verification and integration work that benefits from operating-engineer experience and that is hard to staff inside a large prime once the program is past the proposal phase.

How we staff

Programs are led by a senior engineer who is on the program from kickoff through the last flight on the test card. We do not staff junior engineers as program leads. The engineer at the post-flight review is the engineer the customer met at the kickoff.

Where we are

The office is near UTC in San Diego. We do most of our flight-test deployment work at customer ranges in Yuma, China Lake, and the Pacific Northwest. We have working relationships with test ranges in the Mid-Atlantic for customers operating from there.

Standards we hold ourselves to

• Verification arguments are written down before the test card is built. The test card serves the argument, not the other way around.
• We will not staff a program where the timeline does not permit a defensible verification basis. We will say so before we sign the engagement letter.
• Every report is independently reviewed by a second senior engineer before it leaves the firm.
• We will tell a customer when an autonomy claim is not supportable by the data. That is the work we are paid for.

Hiring

We hire infrequently. Open positions, when they exist, are posted on our careers page. We do not retain a resume bank. We do not work with external recruiting agencies.