GNC Engineer - Controls

About the role

Pivotal is the leader in the emerging market of electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft. We design, develop, and manufacture light eVTOL aircraft and are renowned for the BlackFly aircraft the world's first light eVTOL to fly manned missions and enter the consumer market.

Efficient, compact, and simple, Pivotal aircraft are designed for a wide range of consumer, public service, and defense applications. Our distinctive tilt-aircraft architecture and scalable platform have been flying for over 10 years. Last year we announced our next-generation aircraft, the Helix, which is rapidly progressing toward general release and scalable production in 2026.

Mobility is one of the most highly-valued areas of modern technology investments. This is the right company, in the right space, the right strategy, at the right time. If you are ready for adventure, we invite you to join our amazing team and grow with us.

About the Role

The GNC team at Pivotal develops the flight control and navigation algorithms that let our aircraft fly safely and precisely, including on the Helix family of aircraft. 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. You will work closely with the GNC engineers who own the control law architecture, as well as the firmware, aeromechanical, and flight test teams.

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.

Responsibilities Control Law Analysis & Tuning

- Analyze existing control laws against stability and performance criteria such as gain and phase margins, bandwidth, disturbance rejection, and command tracking.

- Tune control law gains and parameters with CONDUIT to meet these criteria across the flight envelope.

- Assess how actuator and sensor dynamics, time delays, and saturation affect control system stability and performance.

- Update control law gains and parameters in our MATLAB and Simulink models and support their release into flight software.

Simulation & Verification

- Run Monte Carlo studies in our existing simulation environment that vary aircraft parameters, disturbances, and failures to evaluate control law robustness.

- Help identify worst-case conditions and failure scenarios for simulation-based verification, and run and analyze those cases.

- Set up and improve automated integration tests that simulate complete flight missions and check the results against requirements.