Senior GNC Engineer

Description

The company is a defense technology firm building unmanned systems in the United States. It designs and manufactures high-performance drones, tests them in combat, and works at startup pace toward large-scale production.

The team moves quickly, works hands-on, and focuses on shortening the time between design and fielding. Drones are changing how wars are fought, and the company builds systems that aim to help the West compete and deter adversaries. The company hires engineers, operators, and builders who take full ownership and aim to get capability to warfighters within months rather than years.

Responsibilities

• Own terminal guidance and the control path for the company's unmanned aircraft, including the guidance law, aimpoint commands, managing achievable acceleration, and the interface to flight control.
• Be accountable for hitting maneuvering targets accurately under realistic conditions, such as imperfect target state estimates, degraded or lost sensor tracks, and limited control authority late in the engagement.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of professional experience building guidance, navigation, and control software for missiles, interceptors, guided munitions, unmanned aircraft, or similar autonomous vehicles, including owning a guidance or control function through actual flight.
• Expert knowledge of terminal homing guidance: proportional and augmented proportional navigation, zero-effort-miss methods, time-to-go estimation, lead-pursuit geometry, and miss-distance analysis against maneuvering targets.
• Proven experience getting guidance or control software onto a physical air vehicle that has flown, not only tested in simulation.
• Strong production skill in C++ and Python, including embedded or real-time work with deterministic execution and latency limits on resource-constrained flight computers.
• Solid working knowledge of state estimation and sensor fusion, including Kalman and extended Kalman filters, target motion models, covariance propagation, and observability analysis.
• Experience with flight dynamics and control, including autopilots and inner-loop interfaces, control authority and actuator saturation limits, achievable-acceleration envelopes, and position or velocity hold.
• Demonstrated use of flight or field test data for closed-loop analysis, including log replay, reconstructing 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.
• Hands-on experience in flight or field test operations, including test planning, instrumentation requirements, range operations, and reviewing post-test data.
• Experience with terminal guidance against surface or ground targets, including aimpoint selection on extended targets, shaping impact angle or impact point, and planning engagement geometry.
• Experience building safety-critical or high-consequence decision logic, such as engagement authorization, abort criteria, or failsafe behavior, backed by test evidence and written rationale.
• Experience with deterministic, reproducible flight-critical software, including bit-exact replay from logged data.
• Background in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or another field with mature closed-loop evaluation, including regression suites, scenario libraries, and release gating based on measured performance.

Conditions

Base salary range in the US: $163,500 to $228,500 USD.

The range is an estimate that depends on many factors, including experience, education or training, critical skills, and business needs. It covers base salary only. Highly competitive equity grants are part of the total compensation package.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, or disability status.

Benefits

• Highly competitive equity grants are part of total compensation.