Staff GNC Engineer – Flight Controls

Responsibilities

Control Law Architecture & Design

- Own the architecture of the inner- and outer-loop flight control laws, including control modes, gain scheduling, control allocation, and envelope protection.

- Define the criteria used to evaluate control law designs and trade-offs, such as stability margins, bandwidth, disturbance rejection, handling qualities, and robustness.

- Design and tune control laws across the flight envelope, including degraded and failure conditions such as motor failures, using frequency-domain methods and tools such as CONDUIT.

Flight Dynamics & System Identification

- Plan and lead system identification of the aircraft and its subsystems from flight and ground test data, using frequency-domain methods such as CIFER.

- Use identification results and flight data to validate and improve the flight dynamics models and simulation environment the team relies on.

Requirements, Verification & Flight Test

- Define flight control requirements, including stability, performance, and handling qualities requirements, with the systems engineering and safety teams.

- Set the verification strategy for the control laws, including linear analysis, Monte Carlo and worst-case simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and flight test.

- Plan, lead, and analyze flight tests with the flight test team, making risk-informed decisions between flights and resolving differences between simulation and flight.

Technical Leadership

- Mentor engineers on the team, review their designs and analyses, and raise the bar for control law development.

- Advise program leadership and other teams on decisions that affect flight controls, such as actuator, sensor, and aircraft configuration trade-offs.

Education

- Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.

Experience

- 8+ years of industry experience in flight controls or GNC with a Bachelor’s degree, 6+ years with a Master’s degree, or 3+ years with a PhD, or equivalent experience.

- Demonstrated experience taking flight control laws from design through flight test or piloted simulation evaluation, including owning key design decisions.

- Deep understanding of aircraft flight dynamics, including modeling, linearization, and dynamic stability modes.

- Strong command of classical and modern control theory, including frequency-domain analysis, state-space methods, and robustness analysis.

- Experience designing and tuning multi-loop flight control architectures, such as cascaded loops, explicit model following, or dynamic inversion, with gain scheduling across a flight envelope.

- Experience with frequency-domain analysis and system identification of aircraft or rotorcraft from test data.

- Experience planning and analyzing flight tests or piloted simulation evaluations to assess control law performance and handling qualities.

- Proficiency in MATLAB and Simulink for control design, modeling, and simulation.

- Proficiency in Python or MATLAB for flight data analysis, and in C or C++ for writing application-level code.

- Strong communication skills, including presenting technical trade-offs and recommendations to engineers and leadership.

Preferred Qualifications

- Master’s degree or PhD in Aerospace Engineering or a related field, with a focus on flight dynamics or flight controls.

- Experience with eVTOL, tiltrotor, rotorcraft, or other VTOL aircraft, including control through the transition between hover and forward flight.

- Experience using CONDUIT and CIFER.

- Experience with handling qualities specifications and evaluations, such as ADS-33, MIL-DTL-32742, and MIL-STD-1797, including piloted simulation evaluations.

- Experience with envelope protection, control allocation for over-actuated aircraft, and failure accommodation.

- Experience developing flight controls for both piloted and autonomous aircraft.

- Experience flight testing control laws on full-scale or subscale aircraft.

- Experience with Git, continuous integration, and agile development workflows, including automated simulation-based regression testing.

- Experience using AI-assisted development tools, such as Claude, to speed up algorithm development, coding, and data analysis.

- Experience developing flight control software under DO-178C and DO-331, and with ARP4754A and ARP4761 processes.

- Experience with hardware-in-the-loop and integrated simulation test environments.

- Piloting or RC piloting experience, or a strong interest in aviation.