GNC Engineer II – Controls

About the role

Responsibilities

• Analyze existing control laws against stability and performance criteria such as gain and phase margins, bandwidth, disturbance rejection, and command tracking.
• Tune control law gains and parameters with CONDUIT to meet these criteria across the flight envelope.
• Assess how actuator and sensor dynamics, time delays, and saturation affect control system stability and performance.
• Update control law gains and parameters in our MATLAB and Simulink models and support their release into flight software.
• Run Monte Carlo studies in our existing simulation environment that vary aircraft parameters, disturbances, and failures to evaluate control law robustness.
• Help identify worst-case conditions and failure scenarios for simulation-based verification, and run and analyze those cases.
• Set up and improve automated integration tests that simulate complete flight missions and check the results against requirements.
• Support and analyze flight tests, comparing flight data with simulation predictions to assess control performance and refine tuning.
• Document analyses, tuning changes, and test results to support verification activities.

Requirements

• Master’s degree or PhD in Aerospace or Mechanical Engineering or a related field, with a focus on flight controls or flight dynamics.
• Experience using CONDUIT for control system analysis and optimization.
• Familiarity with explicit model-following, dynamic inversion, or other control architectures used in safety-critical aviation.
• Familiarity with handling qualities and flight control specifications such as ADS-33, MIL-STD-1797, and MIL-DTL-9490.
• Experience developing flight controls for VTOL aircraft, multicopters, rotorcraft, or eVTOL platforms.
• 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 with fault detection, or with analyzing control system behavior under failure scenarios such as motor or actuator failures.
• Experience with frequency-domain system identification using CIFER or similar tools.
• Experience with hardware-in-the-loop testing and supporting flight test campaigns.
• Interest in aviation, RC aircraft, or drones.