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Firefighting Pilot Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Palo Alto, CA · On-site

$67 - $89/hr

... co-pilot to guide you. We understand better than anyone how to capture voice, video and text and ... firefighting. This is a senior individual-contributor role. You will not have direct reports. Your ...

Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Palo Alto, CA · On-site

$67 - $89/hr

... co-pilot to guide you. We understand better than anyone how to capture voice, video and text and ... firefighting. This is a senior individual-contributor role. You will not have direct reports. Your ...

... all firefighting, lifesaving, navigation, and safety equipment onboard. * The Cargo Chief Mate ... USCG National Endorsements (Domestic): 500 GRT Oceans or 1,600 GRT Oceans or higher, Mate Pilot of ...

UAS Flight Test Technician

Sausalito, CA · On-site

$80K - $130K/yr

This is a ground operations role working closely with test pilots. You'll apply strong mechanical ... Imagine a world where firefighters can respond to a blaze in under 6 minutes using autonomous ...

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Showing results 1-20

Firefighting Pilot information

See California salary details

$48.9K

$129.2K

$198.4K

How much do firefighting pilot jobs pay per year?

As of Jun 22, 2026, the average yearly pay for firefighting pilot in California is $129,202.00, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $98,700.00 and $153,000.00 per year, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What is a Firefighting Pilot job?

A Firefighting Pilot operates specialized aircraft to combat wildfires by dropping water or fire retardant on flames and creating containment lines. They work closely with ground crews and emergency responders to suppress fires and protect lives, property, and natural resources. These pilots fly in challenging conditions, including low visibility, turbulent air, and high heat. Extensive flight training, aerial firefighting certification, and experience in low-altitude operations are typically required.

What are typical challenges faced by Firefighting Pilots during wildfire season?

Firefighting Pilots often contend with rapidly changing weather conditions, unpredictable fire behavior, and limited visibility due to smoke, which can make every flight uniquely challenging. Missions require precise maneuvers at low altitudes, as well as close coordination with ground crews and other aircraft to maximize effectiveness and ensure safety. The job also involves extended hours during peak wildfire season, with possible deployments to remote or rugged locations. Adaptability, teamwork, and a strong commitment to safety are essential for navigating these challenges and successfully supporting firefighting operations.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive in the Firefighting Pilot position, and why are they important?

To thrive as a Firefighting Pilot, you need advanced piloting skills, extensive hours of flight experience (especially in challenging weather and low-visibility conditions), and a valid commercial pilot’s license with the required ratings. Familiarity with specialized firefighting aircraft, GPS navigation, and communication systems is essential, as is certification in aerial firefighting operations. Critical thinking, calmness under pressure, and effective teamwork are crucial soft skills for making quick decisions in dynamic and hazardous environments. These skills and qualifications ensure mission safety, successful coordination with ground crews, and the effective containment of wildfires.

What are the most commonly searched types of Firefighting Pilot jobs in California? The most popular types of Firefighting Pilot jobs in California are:
What are popular job titles related to Firefighting Pilot jobs in California? For Firefighting Pilot jobs in California, the most frequently searched job titles are:
Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Uniphore

Palo Alto, CA • On-site

$67 - $89/hr

Full-time

Medical, Dental, Vision, Life, Retirement, PTO

Posted 9 days ago


Job description

Uniphore is one of the largest B2B AI-native companies-decades-proven, built-for-scale and designed for the enterprise. The company drives business outcomes, across multiple industry verticals, and enables the largest global deployments.
Uniphore infuses AI into every part of the enterprise that impacts the customer. We deliver the only multimodal architecture centered on customers that combines Generative AI, Knowledge AI, Emotion AI, workflow automation and a co-pilot to guide you. We understand better than anyone how to capture voice, video and text and how to analyze all types of data.
As AI becomes more powerful, every part of the enterprise that impacts the customer will be disrupted. We believe the future will run on the connective tissue between people, machines and data: all in the service of creating the most human processes and experiences for customers and employees.

Job Description:

What You'll Be a Part Of:
Uniphore is one of the largest B2B AI-native companies-decades-proven, built-for-scale and designed for the enterprise. The company drives business outcomes across multiple industry verticals and enables the largest global deployments.Uniphoreinfuses AI into every part of the enterprise thatimpactsthe customer through our multimodal architecture combining Generative AI, Knowledge AI, Emotion AI, workflowautomationand co-pilot guidance.

About the Role:
We're looking for a Principal Site Reliability Engineer to join our Platform Engineering team - someone equally at home writing production Go as designing and operating cloud infrastructure. Thehighest-leveragework hereisn'ta runbook;it'sthe service that enforces the runbook automatically.You'llwriteGo that runs in production and multiplies your impact across hundreds of services.

You'llbuild the standards, frameworks, automations, agentic workflows, and self-service capabilities that make engineering teams autonomous whilemaintainingenterprise-grade reliability and security. Youwon'tjust define standards -you'llimplement them in code: a Kubernetes Operator that enforces service readiness criteria, a service that surfaces SLO health across the fleet, an internal platform service that automates task execution.

You'llcollaborate with feature teams as an expert advisor and standard-setter, helping them build operational maturitywhile you maintainoversight of oursingle/multi-tenant, multi-cloud infrastructure.You'llbe a bridge between software development and systems operations, focused on large-scale, resilient, automated infrastructure rather than daily firefighting.

This is a senior individual-contributor role. You will not have direct reports.Your leadership is technical - exercised through architecture, production code, design reviews, and mentorship.This roleparticipatesin our on-call rotation, which covers all production systems. As aPrincipal,you'llown the hardest escalations and use what you learnon-callto drive the architectural fixes thateliminatewhole classes of incidents.

Responsibilities:

Invention:

  • Define and execute long-term architectural strategy for our multi-cloud platforms.

  • Lead hands-on implementation of critical infrastructure projects, focusing on reliability, automation, and performance at scale.

  • Own multi-year technical roadmaps thatestablishthe vision for infrastructure scalability, reliability, security, and engineering velocity.

Own:

  • Provide technical leadership through design reviews and code contributions; set technical direction,eliminatearchitectural barriers to execution, and drive toward simplicity.

  • Maintain end-to-end technical stewardship of your systems, keeping execution aligned with architectural vision and best practices.

  • Act as a key technical advisor to Engineering Leadership and Product Management, influencing the strategic direction ofUniphore.

  • Lead design reviews across Infrastructure with a focus on automation, scalability, and reliability, and align architectural roadmaps across teams.

  • Partner with Security to build secure-by-default systems and remediate weaknesses.

  • Own the reliability of the systems under your technical stewardship.

  • Create the technical clarity - vision, standards, and tooling - that lets feature teamsbuild,ownandoperatetheirservices.

  • Participate in fleet-wide on-call, owning critical escalations across all production systems and converting recurring failure modes into permanent architectural fixes.

Teach:

  • Establish and evangelize design principles for reliable, secure, scalable systems.

  • Grow other engineers through technical mentorship, architectural guidance, and design review.

Requirements:

  • 10+ years in DevOps/SRE/Platform Engineering, withdemonstratedStaff- or Principal-scope impact anda track recordof transforming operational models.

  • Production Go:youwrite Go regularly, understand its concurrency model, and are comfortable owning Go services in production.

  • Kubernetes depth:operationalexpertiseplus the ability to extend it - you understand the controller-runtime model andcouldwrite ormaintaina Kubernetes Operator.

  • Cloud & infrastructure:expert-level AWS/GCP/Azure, Terraform, and multi-cloud architecture, with strong cost-optimization instincts.

  • Production excellence:deep incident management, RCA process, and on-call system design experience.

  • Software engineering fundamentals:API design, testing, observability instrumentation, and service lifecycle ownership - you treat internal tooling with the same rigor as customer-facing software.

  • Standards & documentation:strong technical writing; you create operational procedures teams can self-execute.

  • Architecture &planning:RFC/PRD review experience; you catch operational problems at design time.

  • Collaboration & coaching:you build team capability through tooling and knowledge transfer rather than doing the work for them.

Nice to Haves:

  • Building Kubernetes Operators, controllers, or admission webhooks (controller-runtime,kubebuilder).

  • Contributions to open-source infrastructure tooling.

  • AWS Solutions Architect Professional or equivalent GCP/Azure certifications.

  • Kubernetes certifications (CKA, CKAD, CKS).

  • Platform engineering, developer experience, or internal developer portals (Backstage, etc.).

  • GitOpspatterns (ArgoCD, Flux) and policy-as-code tooling (OPA,Kyverno).

Why You'll Love This Role:

  • Your code is your leverage.Solutions you ship multiply across dozens of services and teams - you prevent entire classes of problems rather than patching instances.

  • You'llshape the platform strategy.You'lldrive the transformation from reactive support to strategic platform partnership, with platform engineering embedded in planning to prevent downstream issues.

  • You'lltackle the hardest problems.Multi-tenant architecture scaling, cross-service observability, and reliability challenges that affect our largest enterprise deployments.

  • You'llset the bar.Define the standards, incident-management frameworks, and service-ownershipmodelthat let teams graduate to full operational independence.

Hiring Range: $232,900 - $335,811 OTE - for Primary Location Palo Alto, CA



Benefits:


In addition to competitive base pay, this position also includes an annual incentive opportunity based on target achievement, pre-IPO stock options, benefits including medical, dental, vision, 401(k) with a match, and more, plus generous paid time off, paid holidays, paid day off for your birthday and other paid leave policies to support employees through all phases of life.


Location preference:

USA - CA - Palo Alto

Uniphore is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity in the workplace. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability, veteran status, and other protected characteristics.
For more information on how Uniphore uses AI to unify-and humanize-every enterprise experience, please visitwww.uniphore.com.