Required Senior Flight Control Engineer
Why this role exists:
Most flight control teams optimize for handling qualities and margins, then hand the result to acousticians and hope. The causality runs the other way: how the vehicle moves - its transients, its trajectories through a city - is a dominant term in its acoustic signature. This role exists to put a senior control engineer at the point where those decisions are made, owning control laws in which noise is a hard design constraint alongside stability and performance, not a downstream measurement.
What you'll own:
Design, implement, and tune the vehicle's core control laws in MATLAB/Simulink, with acoustic-source models embedded directly in the design loop.
Develop control strategies that treat radiated noise as a hard constraint alongside stability margins and handling qualities, through every phase of flight.
Build and maintain the nonlinear 6-DOF simulation environment used for control design, Monte Carlo robustness analysis, and pre-flight rehearsal of every test point.
Define attitude, rate, and trajectory constraints for noise-critical flight phases - departure, approach, and low-altitude operations over populated areas - jointly with the Acoustics team.
Autocode flight-critical control software to the real-time flight computer and verify it through processor-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop campaigns.
Plan and execute flight test campaigns: write test cards, monitor telemetry in real time, and lead post-flight reconciliation of data against model predictions.
Run system identification programs that anchor aerodynamic, actuator, and noise-source models in flight data, feeding corrections back into the next control law release.
Lead control law design reviews with documented stability margins, robustness analyses, and failure-mode behavior, building the evidence base certification authorities will eventually audit.
Requirements: What you bring
M.Sc. or Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a closely related field, with a focus on dynamics and control.
7+ years designing control laws that flew - on crewed aircraft, UAVs, missiles, or other safety-critical dynamic platforms.
Deep command of classical and modern control: gain scheduling, robust control (H-infinity, mu-analysis), and nonlinear methods such as dynamic inversion or INDI.
Expert-level MATLAB/Simulink, including Simulink Coder or equivalent autocoding workflows, plus working Python or modern C++ for tooling and real-time code.
Hands-on experience carrying control laws through HIL testing into flight test, including telemetry-driven debugging and disciplined envelope expansion.
Solid grounding in flight dynamics, actuator and sensor modeling, and system identification from flight data.
Working knowledge of verification practices for flight-critical software in a DO-178C context, and the discipline to design for certifiability from the first commit.
Clear written English - your design documents, test cards, and analyses become the program's certification record.
Even better if:
Flight control experience on an eVTOL, UAM, or other novel VTOL aircraft program.
Exposure to ARP4754A/ARP4761 development processes or direct work with EASA/FAA certification teams; familiarity with SC-VTOL is a strong plus.
Enough aeroacoustics or psychoacoustics background to argue with the Acoustics team in their own language.
Experience standing up a GNC capability at an early-stage company, where you wrote the first version of everything.
Publications or patents in control allocation, trajectory optimization, or noise-optimal flight.
This position is open to all candidates.