Pivotal Systems
GNC Engineer - Controls
Palo Alto, CA · Mid
Stay score
odds of building a lasting career here
Thin sponsorship signal and lottery-bound. A low-probability bet with your clock running. Prioritize cap-exempt roles and proven entry-level sponsors first.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →Employer immigration record
from this employer's Department of Labor filings
Files H-1B transfers
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.
Community outcomes
No reports yet — be the first to help the next applicant.
About the role
- 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.
Responsibilities
- Update control law gains and parameters in our MATLAB and Simulink models and support their release into flight software.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
- Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
Nice to have
- 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 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.
This listing is sourced directly from Pivotal Systems's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.