Staff Engineer, Core Flight Controls

About You:

• 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.

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.

Qualifications:

• BS in Aerospace/Mechanical/Electrical Engineering.
• 10+ 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 Have:

• 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.

Logistics:

• We welcome remote applicants for this role, with a preference for candidates based in or willing to relocate to Boston, MA for a hybrid work schedule at our HQ.