Staff Engineer, Core Flight Controls

Merlin Labs•Boston, MA

About The Position

Merlin is a venture-backed aerospace startup building a non-human pilot to enable both reduced crew and uncrewed flight. Backed by some of the world’s leading investors, Merlin is scaling alongside our customers to begin leveraging autonomy today to solve some of aviation’s biggest challenges. You are an experienced flight controls engineer passionate about autonomous flight who wants to contribute to making airplanes fly themselves. You are familiar with fixed wing aircraft and the classical and modern methods used to control them automatically. You know how to use industry standard tools for this work, and you are excited to work on novel applications.

Requirements

BS in Aerospace/Mechanical/Electrical Engineering
5+ years of experience developing control systems for fixed wing aircraft, with demonstrated understanding of fixed wing aircraft dynamics, classical and modern control design / analysis
Experience decomposing systems requirements into high level requirements for both outer loop and inner loop control design
Experience working in Model Based Development and certification of flight control systems, including proficiency in MATLAB/Simulink or another model-based development toolset
Experience designing, implementing, and testing software for real-time systems
Experience with linear model development, linear analysis and frequency domain gain tuning techniques

Nice To Haves

MS/PhD in Aerospace Engineering and/or Controls
Experience developing never-before-flown control systems
Experience extracting linear state space models from flight test data
Experience working directly with customers and being a company representative
Pilot license
Proficiency in C/C++ or Python

Responsibilities

Design and implement flight controls for our aircraft automation system.
Decompose system requirements into low level flight controls requirements
Help create and use the simulation tools needed for development and testing including Simulink control law modeling, analysis using MATLAB and Python.
Participate in flight testing for system identification and verification of control law performance on multiple aircraft types.
Own the flight control system from end-to-end and be responsible for product delivery to programs and customers
Collaborate across Merlin to develop novel, certifiable systems to solve the toughest problems in aviation and autonomy.