Pivotal Systems
GNC Engineer - Navigation
Palo Alto, CA · Mid
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odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~45% per draw at Level III). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
$18,518 more — $157,518 — moves this role to Level II and 2 lottery entries. That figure is inside the range the employer already advertised.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $157,518 would place this position at wage Level II. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Aerospace Engineers" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Aerospace Engineers (17-2011) · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
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Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.
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About the role
- These algorithms estimate the aircraft's attitude, heading, position, velocity, and other critical states in real time.
- You will work across the full development lifecycle.
- That includes characterizing sensors and designing algorithms in MATLAB and Simulink, deploying them on embedded flight hardware, testing them in simulation and hardware-in-the-loop, and analyzing flight test data.
Responsibilities
- Design, implement, and tune state estimation algorithms, such as extended and error-state Kalman filters and complementary filters, to estimate attitude, heading, position, velocity, AGL, and air-data states.
- Develop sensor fault detection and isolation, integrity monitoring, and redundancy management, and define how navigation should behave in degraded modes.
- Analyze observability, filter consistency, and navigation error budgets to inform requirements and design trade-offs.
- Develop sensor error models (bias, scale factor, misalignment, noise, latency) and characterize sensors through bench testing and methods such as Allan variance.
- Support sensor selection, mounting, alignment, and calibration, including magnetometer hard- and soft-iron calibration and IMU alignment.
- Implement navigation algorithms in MATLAB and Simulink so they are ready for code generation and real-time execution on embedded flight hardware.
- Develop and maintain navigation and sensor models within the GNC simulation environment.
- Take part in design and code reviews, version control, and continuous integration practices.
Requirements
- Our distinctive tilt-aircraft architecture and scalable platform have been flying for over 10 years.
- If you are ready for adventure, we invite you to join our amazing team and grow with us.
Nice to have
- Master's degree or PhD in Aerospace, Mechanical, or Electrical Engineering or a related field, with a focus on estimation, navigation, or controls.
- Familiarity with GNSS-denied or alternative navigation, such as visual-inertial odometry, terrain or radar aiding, or SLAM.
- Experience with GNSS/INS integration (loosely or tightly coupled), inertial navigation mechanization, and inertial sensor error modeling.
- Experience working with sensors used in autonomy, such as cameras, lidar, and radar, and fusing them into navigation solutions.
- Experience with Git, continuous integration, and agile development workflows.
- Experience using AI-assisted development tools, such as Claude, to speed up algorithm development, coding, and data analysis.
- Experience with fault detection, integrity monitoring, or redundancy management for safety-critical systems.
- Experience with hardware-in-the-loop testing and supporting flight test campaigns.
Compensation
- $139k-$160k
Benefits
- Develop sensor fusion architectures that combine IMU, GNSS, magnetometer, barometric and air-data sensors, and other aiding sources such as radar or lidar altimeters and vision.
This listing is sourced directly from Pivotal Systems's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.