Open Roles

About FlyShirley

FlyShirley is revolutionizing aviation by building an AI copilot that pilots can talk to naturally across simulation environments and eventually real cockpits. Our context-aware AI is being developed in partnership with leading flight training providers and an eVTOL manufacturer.

Our products and technologies include:
• Industry-leading AI training solutions for commercial-grade flight simulators that increase training effectiveness and enable higher student-instructor ratios
• The most responsive and intelligent copilot for home flight sim enthusiasts on the market
• A technical foundation aligned with emerging certification frameworks like EASA's AI guidelines, positioning our technology for both immediate flight training applications and in-flight operation

The Role: Building The Future of Pilot-Centric Aviation AI

As a founding engineer, you'll tackle technical challenges at the intersection of aviation, machine learning, and real-time systems. You'll own critical components of our technology stack while helping shape our engineering culture.

What You'll Build:

• Real-time speech processing systems that work in noisy cockpit environments
• Sophisticated flight data integration pipelines that convert aviation telemetry into contextual understanding
• Training and runtime validation systems ensuring model outputs maintain accuracy and safety
• Web and mobile interfaces that delight pilots from novice to expert
• Deployment pipelines that maintain reliability across distribution environments

Technical Challenges You'll Help Solve:

• Training and deploying models for real-time inference with sub-second latency
• Running Shirley offline, for instance, through a mixture of experts architecture that swizzles model specializations using LoRA adapters
• Establishing reinforcement learning pipelines for optimizing Shirley's guidance

Your First 30 Days

Week 1 (On-Site):

• Deep dive into our architecture, codebase, and product vision
• Set up your development environment and deploy your first feature
• Engage in flight simulator sessions to experience our product firsthand

Weeks 2-4:

• Take ownership of a significant feature from design to deployment
• Participate in customer feedback sessions with pilots and instructors
• Collaborate on our technical roadmap and prioritization
• Establish testing and quality processes for a critical subsystem

What You'll Need

Technical Expertise:

• Deep intuition for software architecture
• Strong experience with typed programming languages
• Experience in building and deploying production-grade web or mobile applications
• Comfort with real-time systems and WebSocket/streaming architectures
• Familiarity with automated testing and CI/CD pipelines

Qualifications That Are Really Fly:

• Existing experience with TypeScript, Node.js, and React
• Technical leadership experience
• Ability to balance rapid iteration & use of generative AI tools with code maintainability
• Excitement about working at the intersection of AI and aviation
• Excellent communication skills and ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders
• Piloting or flight simulation experience (but we can teach you!)

Hiring Process:

1. Initial conversation with founder (45 minutes)
2. Take-home coding challenge, review of prior work sample, or leetcodel33tcode session - your choice (0 - 6 hours)
3. Technical discussion and architecture review (1 hour)
4. Final interview with team members (2 hours)

What We Offer

• Competitive cash compensation with substantial equity in a fast-growing startup
• Highly subsidized flight training and simulator time
• The best tools and access to compute resources
• Direct impact applying cutting-edge research that will have a positive impact on aviation safety
• Work on fascinating problems in AI, including:
  • Context-aware language generation based on real-time flight conditions
  • Reinforcement learning for proactive aviation communications
  • Speech recognition in challenging noise environments
• Opportunity to build both consumer products and technology that will eventually be certified for use in real aircraft
• Small, focused team where your contributions directly shape the company's success

Why Join Us?

This is a unique opportunity to work on technology that will fundamentally change how people learn to fly and how aircraft operate. You'll be joining at the ground floor of a company positioned at the forefront of aviation's pilot-centric AI revolution.

Your work will directly impact:

• Making flight training more accessible and effective
• Building foundations for the next generation of human-AI teamed flight systems
• Creating technology that enhances safety across aviation

If you're excited by challenging technical problems with real-world impact and want to help shape the future of aviation from sim to sky, we want to talk to you!