Backed by Kleiner Perkins.
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 Staff GNC Engineer to lead flight control law development on an aircraft program: owning the control law architecture and its design, tuning, and verification from simulation through flight test. Found on 1752vc Careers, the job board for startup and VC roles.
What they're looking for
- Define flight control requirements, including stability, performance, and handling qualities requirements, with the systems engineering and safety teams
- Set the verification strategy for the control laws, 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, making risk-informed decisions between flights and resolving differences between simulation and flight
- Demonstrated experience taking flight control laws from design through flight test on real aircraft, 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
More about this 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 Staff GNC Engineer to lead flight control law development on an aircraft program: owning the control law architecture and its design, tuning, and verification from simulation through flight test.
You will set the technical direction for how our aircraft are controlled in hover, transition, and forward flight. That includes defining the control law architecture and design criteria, using system identification and flight data to improve our models, and making sure the control laws meet stability, performance, and handling qualities requirements. You will also be a team lead for flight controls, setting priorities for the team, overseeing its technical work, and mentoring the engineers on it, while working closely with the navigation, firmware, aeromechanical, systems engineering, safety, and flight test teams.
The ideal candidate has a track record of taking flight control laws from design to flight on real aircraft, ideally VTOL, rotorcraft, or eVTOL, and the judgment to make sound design and...
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