Staff GNC Engineer

About the role

Archer is an aerospace company based in San Jose, California building an all-electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft with a mission to advance the benefits of sustainable air mobility. We are designing, manufacturing, and operating an all-electric aircraft that can carry four passengers while producing minimal noise.

Responsibilities

• Lead teams to design and implement flight control algorithms for electric VTOL aircraft
• Work cross-functionally to connect GNC requirements with other system requirements
• Influence leadership with decisions that are affected by GNC systems
• Implement creative solutions to efficiently verify complex systems and software
• Build simulations to verify and validate system requirements
• Run trade studies to inform aircraft design and system architecture
• Work with the Flight Test team to design tests that safely evaluate the vehicle capabilities
• Improve the fidelity and capabilities of our vehicle and environment simulation models
• Analyze full-scale and subscale flight data to improve our models
• Author software requirements and test cases that drive the design of the GNC software
• Collaborate with Systems Engineering to properly decompose higher level requirements
• Collaborate with Systems Safety and Systems Engineering to identify and correct any deficiencies in the Flight Control System

Requirements

• Strong knowledge of vehicle dynamics, optimization, and both classical and modern control theory
• BS in Aerospace Engineering, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or a related field with at least 10 years of relevant experience OR MS with at least 8 years of relevant experience OR PhD with at least 6 years of relevant experience
• Proficiency in MATLAB/Simulink

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience verifying GNC systems in simulation and on hardware
• Experience with envelope protection
• Experience with modeling physics, sensors, and actuators
• Experience applying system identification techniques to aircraft or rotorcraft
• Knowledge of fault detection and isolation techniques
• Experience implementing trajectory generation and/or optimization algorithms
• Experience flight testing piloted and/or autonomous aircraft or rotorcraft
• Piloting experience (aircraft or rotorcraft)

Pay

For this position, we are targeting a base pay range of $154,000 - $228,000. Actual compensation offered will be determined by job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.