# GNC Engineer - Navigation at Pivotal

- Company: Pivotal
- What the company does: Backed by Kleiner Perkins.
- Company website: http://www.pivotal.com/
- Type: Startups
- Level: Mid level
- Location: Palo Alto, CA
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $140K to $160K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-10-06
- Apply by: 2026-11-23
- Apply: https://jobs.lever.co/pivotal/de186a5f-64cd-4ae9-949f-d1094608c42c?utm_source=1752vc&utm_medium=careers
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/pivotal-gnc-engineer-ii-navigation/

## About the role

The GNC team at Pivotal develops the flight control and navigation algorithms that let our aircraft fly safely and precisely, including on the Helix family of aircraft. We are looking for a GNC Engineer II who focuses on navigation to design, implement, and verify the state estimation and sensor fusion algorithms. These algorithms estimate the aircraft’s attitude, heading, position, velocity, and other critical states in real time. Found on 1752vc Careers, the job board for startup and VC roles.

## What they're looking for

- 2+ years of industry experience in GNC, navigation, or state estimation, or a Master’s or PhD with research focused on estimation or sensor fusion
- Strong foundation in estimation theory, including Kalman filtering (linear, extended, error-state), complementary filtering, and probability and stochastic processes
- Solid understanding of rigid-body kinematics, attitude representations (quaternions, direction cosine matrices, Euler angles), and reference frames (body, NED, ECEF)
- Hands-on experience designing and tuning an estimator on real sensor data such as IMU, GNSS, magnetometer, or barometer, whether through industry, research, student teams, or personal projects
- Proficiency in MATLAB and Simulink for algorithm development, modeling, and simulation
- Proficiency in Python or MATLAB for analyzing test and flight data

Tags: General Engineering

Source: 1752vc Careers, https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/pivotal-gnc-engineer-ii-navigation/