Drone Flight Controls Engineer

About the role

You will join a drone startup where the flight controller is the product: the team needs an engineer who lives in control laws, tuning, and flight dynamics. You will design, tune, and validate the algorithms that keep aircraft stable in wind, aggressive in maneuvering, and graceful in failure modes. Your work is what customers feel when they say the aircraft "flies well," and it is what keeps the aircraft safe when conditions turn ugly. You will partner closely with the aerodynamics and structures teams so that control designs account for real airframe behavior, including flexibility and unsteady effects, rather than idealized models.

What you will achieve

• Design and tune inner and outer loop control laws for attitude, position, and velocity that meet quantified handling and disturbance-rejection targets across the full flight envelope.
• Reduce tuning time for new airframes by building repeatable system-identification and auto-tuning workflows grounded in real flight data rather than guesswork.
• Improve gust rejection and tracking performance measurably, verified through instrumented flight tests and high-fidelity simulation before any release.
• Extend safe flight envelopes by characterizing and mitigating control issues such as actuator saturation, sensor delay, flexible mode coupling, and ground effect.
• Deliver flight-ready firmware changes with regression test evidence, so control updates ship to the fleet without breaking existing vehicles.

What you will bring

Must-haves

• 2-5 years of experience developing or tuning flight control laws for multicopters, fixed-wing UAVs, or VTOL aircraft.
• Deep working knowledge of PID architectures, feedforward compensation, and at least one modern method such as LQR, MPC, or adaptive control.
• Hands-on tuning experience on PX4 or ArduPilot, including reading flight logs to diagnose oscillation, overshoot, steady-state error, and latency issues.
• Strong grasp of flight dynamics: 6-DOF equations of motion, linearization, stability derivatives, and frequency-domain stability analysis.
• Proficiency in MATLAB/Simulink or Python for modeling, simulation, and flight data analysis.
• Experience with hardware-in-the-loop or software-in-the-loop simulation for control validation before flight.
• Bachelor's degree in aerospace, controls, or related engineering.

Nice-to-haves

• Published or open-source contributions to flight control projects.
• Experience with fault-tolerant control or redundant actuator management for safety-critical aircraft.
• Familiarity with DO-178C processes for flight-critical software certification.
• Background in handling qualities evaluation and pilot-in-the-loop assessment.