Staff GNC Engineer – Flight Controls

About the Role

The GNC team at Pivotal develops the flight control and navigation algorithms that let our aircraft fly safely and precisely, including on the Helix family of aircraft. We are looking for a Staff GNC Engineer to lead flight control law development on an aircraft program: owning the control law architecture and its design, tuning, and verification from simulation through flight test.

You will set the technical direction for how our aircraft are controlled in hover, transition, and forward flight. That includes defining the control law architecture and design criteria, using system identification and flight data to improve our models, and making sure the control laws meet stability, performance, and handling qualities requirements. You will also be a team lead for flight controls, setting priorities for the team, overseeing its technical work, and mentoring the engineers on it, while working closely with the navigation, firmware, aeromechanical, systems engineering, safety, and flight test teams.

The ideal candidate has a track record of taking flight control laws from design to flight on real aircraft, ideally VTOL, rotorcraft, or eVTOL, and the judgment to make sound design and flight test decisions with incomplete information. This role is a strong next step for an engineer who has grown through hands-on flight controls work and is ready to lead a team.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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

Experience

Preferred Qualifications

Attributes aligned with Core Values

Compensation: USD 200,000 – 235,000 per year salary