Senior Engineer, Flight Controls - X-BAT (R4814)

What you'll do

• Design and implement flight control laws and supporting logic across multiple flight regimes.
• Build and mature high-fidelity 6DOF simulation environments used for control development and ensure accurate pre-flight performance predictions.
• Execute verification activities, including linear analysis, Monte Carlo campaigns, disturbance/sensitivity/degraded operation testing, and HIL validation.
• Diagnose and resolve simulation-to-test mismatches, including unidentified dynamics and modeling gaps.
• Support flight test operations and contribute to rapid iteration between flights.
• Work closely with propulsion, aero, actuation, sensors, state estimation, and autonomy teams to ensure accurate integrated system performance in the 6DOF simulation environment.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in flight controls / GNC on real flight vehicles.
• Experience performing one or more of the following technical flight control assignments:
  • Vehicle Modeling and Simulation: Demonstrated experience implementing time-accurate mathematical models of the vehicle aerodynamics, mass properties, fuel system, propulsion system, sensors, actuators into a 6DOF simulation environment.
  • Control Law Design: Demonstrated experience designing inner and outer loop control laws for fixed-wing aircraft using classical or modern control techniques.
  • Control Allocation: Demonstrated experience designing control allocation algorithms for over-actuated systems handling actuator saturation, rate limits, failures and degradation.
  • Guidance and Autonomy Integration: Demonstrated experience designing and testing real-time trajectory generation algorithms.
  • Verification and Validation: Demonstrated experience executing linear, nonlinear, and Monte Carlo Analyses in a 6DOF simulation environment. Demonstrated experience executing sensitivity studies, worst-case disturbance analysis, and/or failure detection and accommodation studies validating control robustness against requirements. Demonstrated experience characterizing aircraft flying qualities against tailored MIL-HDBK-516 Section 6 requirements within a high-fidelity 6DOF Simulation framework. Demonstrated experience in generating flight control and simulation data artifacts for Airworthiness Certification (Simulation Description Document, Flying Qualities Report).
  • Flight Test Support: Demonstrated experience in test planning, envelope expansion strategy, and test point selection.
  • Post-Flight Analysis: Demonstrated experience analyzing flight data, comparing predicted vs actual behavior, performing system identification and model refinement tasks, and implementing control design or simulation model updates.
• Strong background in aircraft flight dynamics and 6DOF simulation.
• Proficiency in C++, MATLAB/Simulink, and/or Python.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance.

Preferred qualifications

• Autonomous systems or missile/UAV GNC background.
• Familiarity with sensor and air data systems, CI/CD pipelines and modern DevSecOps practices.
• Experience integrating NPSS propulsion models (transient and steady state) into a 6DOF simulation environment.
• Experience with HIL or integrated simulation/test environments and Linux-based development workflows (Git, etc.).
• Experience operating in rapid development environments with tight iteration loops between simulation and test.