GNC Engineer (Controls)

Mach Industries•Huntington Beach, CA

About The Position

Support control design and evaluation for Mach’s fixed-wing aircraft. You’ll own your piece of the aircraft design, implementation, and validation of flight-critical control laws—spanning takeoff to landing—delivering robust performance across the full envelope.

Requirements

Education: Bachelors in Engineering, Physics, Mathematics
Experience: 0-5 years designing, analyzing and fielding flight control systems for fixed-wing aircraft or high-performance UAVs, including flight test.
Deep knowledge of flight dynamics, stability/controllability, and actuator/sensor modeling.
Familiarity with modern C++ for embedded real-time implementations; strong MATLAB/Simulink/Python for modeling, ID, and analysis.
Familiarity with verification workflows (SIL/HIL), requirements traceability, and safety reviews.
Familiarity with modern software workflows (git, code review, issue tracking) and data/telemetry analysis.

Nice To Haves

Practical and/or academic experience with modern/MIMO control design (LQR, LQG, LTR), system ID techniques, adaptive control
Experience with energy-based control, autothrottle, sideslip/yaw coordination, and advanced control allocation for over-actuated systems
Experience integrating with PX4 and ROS 2. Exposure to DO-178C/DO-331/ARP4754A processes or equivalent rigor.
Comfort optimizing for resource-constrained processors and hard real-time constraints (latency/jitter budgets, numerics)

Responsibilities

Design control systems within defined architecture and requirements for fixed-wing vehicles
Design and implement control laws accounting for actuator limits, time delays, and sensor noise as part of the controls team
Participate in system identification and aerodynamic model development from wind-tunnel, CFD, and flight-test data
Execute verification & validation work: SIL/HIL campaigns, Monte Carlo, and flight-readiness criteria; communicate findings to the team and program leadership.
Participate in flight-test planning and execution; analyze logs, tune controllers, and iterate safely and quickly.
Learn from the controls team, carry your work through design/code reviews to meet roadmap goals and milestones.