GNC Engineer (Senior/Principal)

Reflect Orbital • Hawthorne, CA

4d • $130,000 - $220,000

About The Position

As a GNC Engineer (Senior/Principal), you will directly shape the in-orbit performance of a novel space vehicle. Your work will span vehicle-level dynamics and control, orbit propagation, flight software and HITL testing on our avionics. We're looking for someone who brings "full-stack" GNC development capability to the table.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional GNC engineering experience, ideally on spacecraft or other dynamically controlled vehicles.
• Clear technical ownership of a GNC subsystem that has flown, covering the simulation, the algorithms and the flight software.
• Strong background in modeling physical systems from first principles, including flexible body dynamics, sensors, actuators and the space environment.
• Expertise in state estimation design for attitude and orbit determination, validated in flight.
• Ability to verify and validate GNC flight software in an integrated environment, using HITL testing.
• Experience in guidance, maneuver and constellation design, including orbit selection, coverage and station-keeping.
• Experience in real-time spacecraft operations support, from commissioning through console operations to on-orbit anomaly resolution.
• Fluency in Python, C++ and/or Rust.

Nice To Haves

• Even if you don’t meet 100% of the above qualifications, we are likely still interested in hearing from you. Hiring exceptional individuals is our #1 priority, and we believe that exceptional people often have highly unusual backgrounds.
• We are also interested in carving out unique roles for unconventional people that we are excited about working with.

Responsibilities

• Come up with creative solutions to the unique problems that come with precisely putting a spot of reflected sunlight on the ground from space.
• Design, develop and test our closed-loop guidance, navigation and control for both attitude and orbit.
• Plan trajectories and attitude motion profiles that satisfy our spot serving constraints.
• Develop and own our 6-DOF simulation of vehicle attitude and orbital dynamics, and use it to characterize vehicle performance through Monte Carlo analysis.
• Write GNC algorithms in flight software (C++/Rust) and validate them using our avionics in the loop.
• Drive sensor and actuator selection with our avionics engineers so attitude determination and control are reliable in flight.
• Analyze and plan orbits and constellation design to maximize our overall spot serving capability.

Benefits

• Broad choice of medical/dental/vision coverage, Reflect covers 100% of each base-policy
• Access to HSA, FSA, and 401K
• Unlimited paid time off, two-weeks per year encouraged
• Healthy lunches provided daily

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed