Senior GNC Engineer - Flight Controls

Pivotal•Palo Alto, CA

10d•Onsite

About The Position

Pivotal is seeking a Senior GNC Engineer to design, tune, and verify flight control laws for its aircraft, including the Helix family. The role takes flight control laws from analysis and simulation through flight test. The engineer owns control laws for specific flight modes and control loops within the architecture established by the technical leads, including analysis and tuning with CONDUIT, system identification to support aircraft models, Monte Carlo and mission-level verification, and flight test support. The role works closely with navigation, firmware, aeromechanical, systems engineering, and flight test teams, and includes mentoring less experienced engineers. The ideal candidate is an independently working flight controls engineer with experience designing and tuning control laws evaluated in flight test or piloted simulation. Experience on VTOL, rotorcraft, or eVTOL aircraft is preferred. The position is onsite at Pivotal’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Applicants must be eligible for employment in the United States.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
At least 5 years of industry experience in flight controls or GNC with a Bachelor’s degree, at least 3 years with a Master’s degree, or a PhD with research in flight dynamics or flight controls, or equivalent experience.
Hands-on experience designing and tuning flight control laws evaluated in flight test or piloted simulation.
Solid understanding of aircraft flight dynamics, including modeling, linearization, and dynamic stability modes.
Strong foundation in classical and modern control theory, including frequency-domain analysis, state-space methods, and stability margins.
Experience with multi-loop flight control architectures, such as cascaded loops, explicit model following, or dynamic inversion.
Experience using simulation to verify control law performance, including Monte Carlo or worst-case analysis.
Proficiency in MATLAB and Simulink for control design, modeling, and simulation.
Proficiency in Python or MATLAB for flight data analysis, and in C or C++ for writing application-level code.
Strong communication skills and ability to work independently in a fast-paced, collaborative environment.
Eligibility for employment in the United States and willingness to work onsite at the Palo Alto, California headquarters.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree or PhD in Aerospace Engineering or a related field, focused on flight dynamics or flight controls.
Experience using CONDUIT and CIFER.
Experience with eVTOL, tiltrotor, rotorcraft, or other VTOL aircraft, including control through transitions between hover and forward flight.
Experience with handling-qualities specifications and evaluations, such as ADS-33, MIL-DTL-32742, and MIL-STD-1797, including piloted simulation evaluations.
Experience flight testing control laws on full-scale or subscale aircraft.
Experience with control allocation, envelope protection, or failure accommodation.
Experience with hardware-in-the-loop and integrated simulation test environments.
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 accelerate algorithm development, coding, and data analysis.
Familiarity with DO-178C, DO-331, ARP4754A, and ARP4761.
Piloting or RC piloting experience, or a strong interest in aviation.

Responsibilities

Design, modify, and tune control laws for assigned flight modes and control loops, including inner-loop attitude control, outer-loop velocity and position control, and mode transitions, within the established architecture.
Analyze control laws against stability, performance, and handling-qualities criteria, including stability margins, bandwidth, disturbance rejection, and command tracking, using tools such as CONDUIT.
Propose improvements to control law architecture and design criteria based on analysis and test results.
Perform system identification of the aircraft and its subsystems from flight and ground test data, using frequency-domain methods such as CIFER.
Use system identification results to update flight dynamics models and the simulation environment.
Develop control-law verification cases, including Monte Carlo, worst-case, and failure-case simulations and automated mission-level tests, and analyze results against requirements.
Help write flight control requirements and trace them to designs and tests in collaboration with systems engineering.
Help plan flight test points for the assigned area, support flight tests, and analyze flight data to evaluate and refine control law performance.
Review other engineers’ designs and analyses, and mentor less experienced engineers.
Work with firmware, aeromechanical, and flight test teams on integration issues such as actuator and sensor dynamics, time delays, and flight software implementation.