Senior GNC Engineer

Neros Technologies•Torrance, CA

About The Position

The GNC Engineer owns terminal guidance and the associated control path across Neros unmanned aircraft, covering the guidance law, aimpoint command, achievable-acceleration management, and the interface to flight control. This role is accountable for engagement accuracy against maneuvering targets under realistic conditions, including imperfect target state estimates, degraded or lost sensor track, and limited control authority late in the engagement.

Requirements

5+ years of professional experience developing guidance, navigation, and control software for missiles, interceptors, guided munitions, unmanned aircraft, or comparable autonomous vehicles, with demonstrated ownership of a guidance or control function through flight
Expert-level knowledge of terminal homing guidance, including proportional and augmented proportional navigation, zero-effort-miss formulations, time-to-go estimation, lead-pursuit geometry, and miss-distance analysis against maneuvering targets
Demonstrated delivery of guidance or control software onto a physical air vehicle that has flown, not just in simulation
Production proficiency in C++ and Python, including embedded or real-time development under deterministic execution and latency constraints on resource-limited flight computers
Working depth in state estimation and sensor fusion, including Kalman and extended Kalman filtering, target motion models, covariance propagation, and observability analysis
Experience with flight dynamics and control, including autopilot and inner-loop interfaces. Including control authority and actuator saturation limits, achievable-acceleration envelopes, and position or velocity hold control
Demonstrated use of flight or field test data for closed-loop analysis, including log-based replay, reconstruction of onboard decisions, and root-cause investigation of anomalous engagements
Fluency with coordinate frame conventions, time synchronization, sensor latency accounting, and uncertainty representation across software interfaces
Experience participating directly in flight or field test operations, including test planning, instrumentation requirements, range operations, and post-test data review

Nice To Haves

Experience with terminal guidance against surface or ground targets, including aimpoint selection on an extended target, impact-angle or impact-point shaping, and engagement geometry planning
Experience developing safety-critical or high-consequence decision logic, such as engagement authorization, abort criteria, or failsafe behavior, together with the supporting test evidence and written rationale
Experience with deterministic, reproducible software design for flight-critical components, including bit-exact replay from logged data.
Background in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or another domain with mature closed-loop evaluation practice, including regression suites, scenario libraries, and release gating on measured performance

Responsibilities

Owns terminal guidance and the associated control path across Neros unmanned aircraft, covering the guidance law, aimpoint command, achievable-acceleration management, and the interface to flight control.
Accountable for engagement accuracy against maneuvering targets under realistic conditions, including imperfect target state estimates, degraded or lost sensor track, and limited control authority late in the engagement.
Participate directly in flight or field test operations, including test planning, instrumentation requirements, range operations, and post-test data review.