Flight Controls Engineer (R4815)

What you'll do:

• Design and implement ship-relative guidance for approach, station keeping, alignment, and terminal recovery. 

• Develop deck-motion compensation and landing-timing strategies that account for navigation uncertainty, aircraft response, control authority, and touchdown or capture constraints. 

• Work closely with state estimation and sensing teams to define relative-navigation requirements and ensure recovery guidance remains robust to measurement errors, latency, and intermittent sensor availability. 

• Implement recovery sequencing and contingency logic, including hold, wave-off, go-around, retry, and responses to degraded or lost navigation. 

• Develop and integrate real-time guidance software in C++, working with flight controls, autonomy, embedded software, and recovery-system teams. 

• Define recovery performance requirements and verify them through 6DOF simulation, Monte Carlo analysis, software-in-the-loop testing, and hardware-in-the-loop testing. 

• Support test planning, flight readiness assessments, and flight operations. Analyze test data, diagnose performance shortfalls, and drive improvements between tests. 

• Provide technical direction within the recovery-guidance effort, mentor engineers, and communicate design decisions, limitations, and test results across teams. 

Required qualifications:

• Demonstrated hands-on experience designing, implementing, and flight-testing guidance laws for autonomous shipboard recovery, including recovery using relative navigation without GPS/GNSS. 

• Strong understanding of moving-platform guidance, ship-relative reference frames, deck motion, and terminal position, velocity, and attitude constraints. 

• Experience integrating guidance with relative-navigation systems and assessing the closed-loop effects of navigation bias, noise, latency, and dropouts. 

• Strong background in flight dynamics and guidance and control, including the relationship between guidance demands, aircraft tracking bandwidth, and available control authority. 

• Proficiency in C++ for real-time algorithm implementation and MATLAB/Simulink or Python for algorithm development and analysis. 

• Experience executing verification and validation through simulation, hardware integration, flight testing, and post-flight analysis. 

• Demonstrated ability to own a technical capability, resolve problems across subsystem boundaries, and work effectively with navigation, controls, software, and test engineers. 

• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance. 

Preferred qualifications:

• Full-scale, at-sea flight-test experience with autonomous shipboard recovery. 

• VTOL or rotorcraft experience involving precision recovery to constrained or significantly moving landing platforms. 

• Experience characterizing recovery performance across ship motion, wind over deck, ship airwake, turbulence, and degraded visibility. 

• Experience integrating vision, infrared, lidar, radar, or cooperative RF sensing into a relative-navigation and recovery system. 

• Experience supporting ship–aircraft dynamic-interface testing, recovery-envelope development, flight safety, or airworthiness. 

• Familiarity with Linux-based development, Git, automated testing, and CI/CD workflows. 

• Ability to obtain S//SAR access.