Staff GNC Engineer – Flight Controls

Pivotal•Palo Alto, CA

About The Position

Pivotal is seeking a Staff GNC Engineer to lead flight control law development for its aircraft, including the Helix family. The role owns the control law architecture and its design, tuning, and verification from simulation through flight test, and sets technical direction for controlling aircraft in hover, transition, and forward flight. The engineer will define design criteria, use system identification and flight data to improve models, and ensure control laws meet stability, performance, and handling qualities requirements. The position provides technical leadership and mentorship to other engineers and collaborates with navigation, firmware, aeromechanical, systems engineering, safety, and flight test teams. The ideal candidate has taken flight control laws from design to flight on real aircraft, preferably VTOL, rotorcraft, or eVTOL, and can make sound design and flight-test decisions with incomplete information.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
8+ years of industry experience in flight controls or GNC with a Bachelor’s degree, 6+ years with a Master’s degree, or 3+ years with a PhD, or equivalent experience.
Demonstrated experience taking flight control laws from design through flight test or piloted simulation evaluation, including owning key design decisions.
Deep understanding of aircraft flight dynamics, including modeling, linearization, and dynamic stability modes.
Strong command of classical and modern control theory, including frequency-domain analysis, state-space methods, and robustness analysis.
Experience designing and tuning multi-loop flight control architectures, such as cascaded loops, explicit model following, or dynamic inversion, with gain scheduling across a flight envelope.
Experience with frequency-domain analysis and system identification of aircraft or rotorcraft from test data.
Experience planning and analyzing flight tests or piloted simulation evaluations to assess control law performance and handling qualities.
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, including presenting technical trade-offs and recommendations to engineers and leadership.

Nice To Haves

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

Responsibilities

Own the architecture of inner- and outer-loop flight control laws, including control modes, gain scheduling, control allocation, and envelope protection.
Define criteria for evaluating control law designs and trade-offs, including stability margins, bandwidth, disturbance rejection, handling qualities, and robustness.
Design and tune control laws across the flight envelope, including degraded and failure conditions such as motor failures, using frequency-domain methods and tools such as CONDUIT.
Plan and lead system identification of the aircraft and its subsystems using flight and ground test data and frequency-domain methods such as CIFER.
Use identification results and flight data to validate and improve flight dynamics models and the simulation environment.
Define flight control requirements for stability, performance, and handling qualities with systems engineering and safety teams.
Set the control law verification strategy, including linear analysis, Monte Carlo and worst-case simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and flight test.
Plan, lead, and analyze flight tests with the flight test team; make risk-informed decisions between flights and resolve differences between simulation and flight.
Mentor engineers, review their designs and analyses, and improve control law development practices.
Advise program leadership and other teams on decisions affecting flight controls, including actuator, sensor, and aircraft configuration trade-offs.