Flight Controls Engineer - Autonomous Shipboard Recovery Guidance

About the role

Shield AI, a defense-tech company developing aircraft and autonomy software, is hiring a Flight Controls Engineer in Seattle. You will design, implement and flight-test autonomous shipboard recovery guidance for X-BAT, focusing on precision recovery to a moving ship in GPS-degraded and GPS-denied environments. You will own the recovery guidance algorithms and their integration with relative navigation, flight controls and recovery hardware, working within an established G&C team.

Key responsibilities

• Design and implement ship-relative guidance for approach, station keeping, alignment and terminal recovery.
• Develop deck-motion compensation and landing-timing strategies accounting for navigation uncertainty, aircraft response, control authority and touchdown or capture constraints.
• Work with state estimation and sensing teams to define relative-navigation requirements and keep guidance robust to measurement errors, latency and intermittent sensors.
• Implement recovery sequencing and contingency logic, including hold, wave-off, go-around, retry and responses to degraded or lost navigation.
• Develop and integrate real-time guidance software in C++, working with flight controls, autonomy, embedded software and recovery-system teams.
• Define recovery performance requirements and verify them through 6DOF simulation, Monte Carlo analysis, software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop testing.
• Support test planning, flight readiness assessments and flight operations, analyze test data and diagnose performance shortfalls.
• Provide technical direction, mentor engineers and communicate design decisions and test results across teams.

Required profile

• Demonstrated hands-on experience designing, implementing and flight-testing guidance laws for autonomous shipboard recovery, including relative navigation without GPS/GNSS.
• Strong understanding of moving-platform guidance, ship-relative reference frames, deck motion and terminal position, velocity and attitude constraints.
• Experience integrating guidance with relative-navigation systems and assessing closed-loop effects of navigation bias, noise, latency and dropouts.
• Strong background in flight dynamics, guidance and control, including the relationship between guidance demands, aircraft tracking bandwidth and control authority.
• Experience executing verification and validation through simulation, hardware integration, flight testing and post-flight analysis.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance.

Required skills

• C++ for real-time algorithm implementation.
• MATLAB/Simulink or Python for algorithm development and analysis.
• Preferred: full-scale at-sea flight-test experience, VTOL or rotorcraft precision recovery, vision/infrared/lidar/radar/cooperative RF sensing integration, Linux, Git, automated testing and CI/CD.