GNC Engineer - Controls
Pivotal
Invite-only right now: save jobs, track applications, build tailored resumesAlready have an account? Log in
- Location
- Palo Alto, CA
- Work style
- On-site
- Job type
- Full time
- Posted
- Oct 6
- 13 days ago
Career path
See where this role leads
Jigup maps the next three moves from a job like this one, with the titles and the skills each step asks for.
About the company
Pivotal
Aviation & aerospace · 51 to 200 employees
What you'll do
- Analyze existing control laws against stability and performance criteria such as gain and phase margins, bandwidth, disturbance rejection, and command tracking.
- Tune control law gains and parameters with CONDUIT to meet these criteria across the flight envelope.
- Assess how actuator and sensor dynamics, time delays, and saturation affect control system stability and performance.
- Update control law gains and parameters in our MATLAB and Simulink models and support their release into flight software.
- Run Monte Carlo studies in our existing simulation environment that vary aircraft parameters, disturbances, and failures to evaluate control law robustness.
- Help identify worst-case conditions and failure scenarios for simulation-based verification, and run and analyze those cases.
- Set up and improve automated integration tests that simulate complete flight missions and check the results against requirements.
- Support and analyze flight tests, comparing flight data with simulation predictions to assess control performance and refine tuning.
- Document analyses, tuning changes, and test results to support verification activities.
What you need
- Master’s degree or PhD in Aerospace or Mechanical Engineering or a related field, with a focus on flight controls or flight dynamics.
- Experience using CONDUIT for control system analysis and optimization.
- Familiarity with explicit model-following, dynamic inversion, or other control architectures used in safety-critical aviation.
- Familiarity with handling qualities and flight control specifications such as ADS-33, MIL-STD-1797, and MIL-DTL-9490.
- Experience developing flight controls for VTOL aircraft, multicopters, rotorcraft, or eVTOL platforms.
- Experience with Git, continuous integration, and agile development workflows, including automated simulation-based regression testing.
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools, such as Claude, to speed up algorithm development, coding, and data analysis.
- Experience with fault detection, or with analyzing control system behavior under failure scenarios such as motor or actuator failures.
- Experience with frequency-domain system identification using CIFER or similar tools.
- Experience with hardware-in-the-loop testing and supporting flight test campaigns.
- Interest in aviation, RC aircraft, or drones.
Key skills
Linear control theoryAircraft flight dynamicsFrequency-domain control system analysisCONDUITControl lawsMonte Carlo simulations
Keywords for your resumePro
The words this employer's screening is likely to look for.
This job lists resume keywords
The terms this posting uses, pulled out so you can mirror them in your resume. Jigup Pro members see the list on the job board.
See full description on company page, apply now
Read the full posting here
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 GNC Engineer II who focuses on flight controls to evaluate and tune our existing control laws, so the aircraft has stable, responsive, and predictable handling across the flight envelope.
You will use CONDUIT and our existing simulation environment to analyze the control laws against stability and performance criteria, tune their gains, and check their behavior in Monte Carlo and full-mission simulations before they go to flight test. You will work closely with the GNC engineers who own the control law architecture, as well as the firmware, aeromechanical, and flight test teams.
The ideal candidate has a solid grounding in linear control theory and aircraft flight dynamics, and enjoys the analytical work of understanding why a control system behaves the way it does and how to improve it. Experience with frequency-domain control system analysis is highly desirable.