Sr. Controls Engineer

Aurelius Systems•San Francisco, CA

17h•Hybrid

About The Position

Aurelius Systems is a VC-backed defense tech startup building autonomous, edge-deployed robotics systems using directed energy for counter-UAS. We build laser weapons to shoot down drones. We're a small team of ~10 engineers, former US military operators, and subject matter experts scaling America's directed energy dominance. The first cost-effective, reliable and robust laser weapon system. Our namesake isn't an accident. Marcus Aurelius wrote about doing the work in front of you, every day, without excuses. Henry Ford didn't wait for permission to reinvent manufacturing. That's how we operate; small team, unreasonable output, no hiding behind the unachievable. In addition to our San Francisco lab/office, we opened our Detroit manufacturing hub and we field test weekly on our own 400-acre private range. You'll own the precision motion stack that puts a laser on a drone. The critical gap we're hiring for is a hand-on robotics controls engineer who can iterate fast on real hardware. Someone who can take a model, get it on the hardware, characterize what's actually happening, and tighten the loop. You think in Bode plots and step responses. This is a senior IC role on the controls side. You'll own the architecture and tuning of the precision pointing and tracking control loops, the state estimation behind them, and the closed loop integration with the tracker.

Requirements

4+ years of experience in robotics
Strong knowledge of fundamentals: classical controls, state space, LQR, MPC
Proven simulation experience and a track record of managing the sim-to-real gap on actual hardware
Modern C++ for real time control implementation
Python or MATLAB/Simulink for modeling, system ID, and analysis
State estimation in practice (Kalman, EKF, UKF, complementary filters)
System identification and frequency domain tuning
Direct experience with motion control hardware — servo drives, brushless motors, encoders, IMUs
Comfortable working at the seam between mechanical, electrical, and software
Understanding of latency, jitter, and how they kill control loop performance
Controls experience is purely simulation
Real world tuning amounts to changing PID gains in a UI
Experience characterizing a resonance, modeling an actuator, or fighting a sensor that lies to you
Tuned hardware that fought back
U.S. Person status required due to access to export-controlled information

Nice To Haves

Advanced MPC — nonlinear MPC, robust MPC, or real-time NMPC on resource constrained hardware
Gimbal, beam director, or precision pointing system experience
Aerospace, defense, or directed energy controls background
Adaptive or robust control implementation in production
Vision-in-the-loop control (visual servoing, image-based tracking)
Hardware-in-the-loop simulation experience
High bandwidth sensor pipelines (cameras, radar, IMUs at high rate)
Prior work on a system that had to hit a moving target

Responsibilities

Architecture and tuning of the precision pointing and tracking control loops
Closed loop tracking from sensor input through actuator command at hundreds of Hz
State estimation across IMU, encoder, and vision based feedback (Kalman filters, complementary filters, sensor fusion)
System identification and modeling of the gimbal, mount, and actuator dynamics
Actuator tuning, gain scheduling, and compensation for nonlinearities (backlash, friction, saturation)
Resonance characterization, notch filtering, and structural compensation
Simulation infrastructure for controls development
Hardware-in-the-loop test infrastructure for controls validation
Field characterization of the system against real targets at the range
Author controls documentation and tuning standards