{"id":3281017,"url":"https://alion.io/job/pivotal-staff-gnc-engineer-flight-controls","title":"Staff GNC Engineer – Flight Controls","company":{"id":35040,"name":"Pivotal","domain":"pivotal.aero","url":"https://alion.io/company/pivotal-aero","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":94,"open_postings":19,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.053,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":107,"computed_at":"2026-10-27T05:46:45Z"}},"role":"Aerospace","role_family":"Aerospace","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Palo Alto, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":176000,"max":200000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":200000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"MATLAB","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Simulink","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":true},{"name":"Claude","optional":true},{"name":"DO-178C","optional":true},{"name":"Git","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-26T15:14:04Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-26","last_verified_at":"2026-10-28T00:42:36Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":1,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":1},"description":"About the Role\nThe 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 our flight control law work: owning the control law architecture and its design, tuning, and verification from simulation through flight test.\nYou 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 mentor engineers on the team and work closely with the navigation, firmware, aeromechanical, systems engineering, safety, and flight test teams.\nThe 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 flight test decisions with incomplete information.\nResponsibilities\nControl Law Architecture & Design\nOwn the architecture of the inner- and outer-loop flight control laws, including control modes, gain scheduling, control allocation, and envelope protection.\nDefine the criteria used to evaluate control law designs and trade-offs, such as stability margins, bandwidth, disturbance rejection, handling qualities, and robustness.\nDesign 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.\nFlight Dynamics & System Identification\nPlan and lead system identification of the aircraft and its subsystems from flight and ground test data, using frequency-domain methods such as CIFER.\nUse identification results and flight data to validate and improve the flight dynamics models and simulation environment the team relies on.\nRequirements, Verification & Flight Test\nDefine flight control requirements, including stability, performance, and handling qualities requirements, with the systems engineering and safety teams.\nSet the verification strategy for the control laws, including linear analysis, Monte Carlo and worst-case simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and flight test.\nPlan, lead, and analyze flight tests with the flight test team, making risk-informed decisions between flights and resolving differences between simulation and flight.\nTechnical Leadership\nMentor engineers on the team, review their designs and analyses, and raise the bar for control law development.\nAdvise program leadership and other teams on decisions that affect flight controls, such as actuator, sensor, and aircraft configuration trade-offs.\nEducation\nBachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.\nExperience\n8+ 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.\nDemonstrated experience taking flight control laws from design through flight test or piloted simulation evaluation, including owning key design decisions.\nDeep understanding of aircraft flight dynamics, including modeling, linearization, and dynamic stability modes.\nStrong command of classical and modern control theory, including frequency-domain analysis, state-space methods, and robustness analysis.\nExperience 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.\nExperience with frequency-domain analysis and system identification of aircraft or rotorcraft from test data.\nExperience planning and analyzing flight tests or piloted simulation evaluations to assess control law performance and handling qualities.\nProficiency in MATLAB and Simulink for control design, modeling, and simulation.\nProficiency in Python or MATLAB for flight data analysis, and in C or C++ for writing application-level code.\nStrong communication skills, including presenting technical trade-offs and recommendations to engineers and leadership.\nPreferred Qualifications\nMaster’s degree or PhD in Aerospace Engineering or a related field, with a focus on flight dynamics or flight controls.\nExperience with eVTOL, tiltrotor, rotorcraft, or other VTOL aircraft, including control through the transition between hover and forward flight.\nExperience using CONDUIT and CIFER.\nExperience with handling qualities specifications and evaluations, such as ADS-33, MIL-DTL-32742, and MIL-STD-1797, including piloted simulation evaluations.\nExperience with envelope protection, control allocation for over-actuated aircraft, and failure accommodation.\nExperience developing flight controls for both piloted and autonomous aircraft.\nExperience flight testing control laws on full-scale or subscale aircraft.\nExperience with Git, continuous integration, and agile development workflows, including automated simulation-based regression testing.\nExperience using AI-assisted development tools, such as Claude, to speed up algorithm development, coding, and data analysis.\nExperience developing flight control software under DO-178C and DO-331, and with ARP4754A and ARP4761 processes.\nExperience with hardware-in-the-loop and integrated simulation test environments.\nPiloting or RC piloting experience, or a strong interest in aviation.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5566,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Military Logistics"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-26T16:29:35Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring 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