Senior GNC Engineer Verified today

About Inversion

Inversion is an aerospace and defense company pioneering advanced reentry technology. The company's maneuverable reentry spacecraft, Arc, is designed for rapid global cargo delivery, hypersonic testing, and national security missions. Inversion designs, manufactures, and integrates its spacecraft under one roof in Los Angeles.

The Role

As Senior GNC Engineer (Controls), you will own the development of the flight control system that allows Arc to track aggressive guidance commands quickly and crisply. You will work on highly responsive airframe and control system design for high-performance maneuvering reentry vehicles.

Your Responsibilities

• Develop plant models of the vehicle and its subsystems including aerodynamics, actuators, sensors, and structural dynamics at the fidelity needed for control design and verification
• Design and analyze high-rate flight control loops that stabilize a statically unstable airframe across the flight envelope
• Deliver the autopilot bandwidth and command tracking needed to respond quickly to real-time guidance commands
• Quantify and manage stability margins in the presence of sample rate, latency, actuator dynamics, and structural mode constraints
• Integrate and exercise control designs in 3-DOF and 6-DOF flight simulations, including Monte Carlo robustness assessment across dispersed conditions
• Carry control algorithms through implementation in real-time flight software and hardware-in-the-loop testing
• Work closely with the guidance, aerodynamics, structures, and avionics teams to close vehicle-level performance

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, a related field, or equivalent experience
• Typically 5+ years of applicable experience designing and testing control systems for aerospace vehicles
• Experience building plant models of aerospace systems, including aerodynamic, actuator, and sensor dynamics and controlling open-loop unstable systems
• Experience with high-rate digital control design, including discretization, sample rate selection, and the management of latency and computational delay
• Experience developing and exercising 3-DOF and 6-DOF flight simulations
• Strong fundamentals in classical and modern control theory, including frequency-domain loop shaping, stability margin analysis, and state-space methods
• Proficiency with MATLAB/Simulink and programming languages such as Python or C++
• Demonstrated excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Capable of working in a dynamic, fast-paced startup environment
• Must have the ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. government Secret/Top Secret security clearance

Desired Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in Aerospace Engineering or a related field, or equivalent experience
• Experience with autopilot design for reentry, hypersonic, missile, or other high-dynamic-pressure flight systems
• Experience applying frequency-domain loop shaping to flight control design, including the construction of phase and gain budgets and the management of two-sided stability margins for conditionally stable systems
• Experience modeling actuator nonlinearities, including rate and position limits, and their effect on stability of unstable plants
• Experience with flexible-body dynamics and aeroservoelastic effects, including structural mode filtering