Staff GNC Engineer - Flight Controls

Salary Range: 200000 to 235000 (Currency: USD) (Pay period: per-year-salary)

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.

Team Leadership

• Serve as a team lead for flight controls: plan and prioritize the team’s work, assign tasks, track progress, and keep the team aligned with program schedules.
• Mentor and develop the engineers on the team, from early-career to Senior, 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.
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.

Experience

Demonstrated experience taking flight control laws from design through flight test on real aircraft, 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 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.
Experience leading the work of other engineers, such as serving as a technical or team lead on a project, planning and assigning work, and reviewing designs.
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 as a team lead or people manager for a flight controls or GNC team.
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.

Attributes aligned with Core Values

Safety Above All: Demonstrates a proactive safety mindset by embedding safety into daily work, identifying and mitigating risks, encouraging open dialogue about safety concerns, and continuously improving practices and protocols.
Customer Focus: Puts customers at the center of every action by understanding their challenges, delivering meaningful value, and supporting their success.
Work Better Together: Seeks and values diverse perspectives, builds cross-functional relationships, and fosters trust through empathetic, fact-based communication and commitment to shared decisions.
Be the Pilot: Drives results with clarity and purpose by focusing on what matters most, adapting to change, taking initiative, and owning outcomes.
Embrace the Unknown: Navigates ambiguity with resilience and bold thinking, challenges the status quo, and combines innovative ideas with practical approaches to overcome obstacles and drive progress.
Respect for People: Fosters a high-performance culture grounded in respect, professionalism, and support by balancing high expectations with a healthy, collaborative environment and being a trusted, dependable teammate.