Staff Engineer - Guidance Navigation Controls

Northrop Grumman Northrop Grumman · Aerospace · El Segundo, CA +1 · Systems/Architecture/Test

Staff Engineer role focused on the design, development, implementation, verification, and testing of Guidance, Navigation, and Controls (GNC) systems for manned and unmanned air vehicles. Responsibilities include developing control laws, simulation models, and analyzing flight test data, with a strong emphasis on fixed-wing aircraft dynamics and control principles. Requires a STEM degree and significant experience in GNC, MATLAB, Simulink, and C/C++/Python, along with a Secret security clearance.

What you'd actually do

  1. Support research and development of flight control algorithms for manned and unmanned air vehicles.
  2. Design, develop, implement, verify, and test algorithms, software, and simulation tools to perform guidance, navigation and control (GNC) of autonomous unmanned aircraft.
  3. Develop control laws to meet air vehicle performance, flying qualities and stability margin requirements, both on ground and in flight.
  4. Design outer and inner loop control laws, and associated logic and autonomy functions.
  5. Develop air vehicle system linear and non-linear dynamic simulation models and integrate models into software and hardware-in-the-loop simulation environments.

Skills

Required

  • Bachelor's degree in STEM with 12 years of experience, OR Master's with 10 years, OR PhD with 8 years
  • Fixed-wing aircraft flight dynamics
  • Linear control principles and tools
  • Analyzing non-linear simulations of aircraft closed-loop dynamics
  • Autopilot functions
  • Outer/inner loop control law performance requirements
  • MATLAB
  • Simulink
  • Simulink Stateflow Modeling
  • Autocoding Simulink models
  • Designing autopilot functions
  • Logic, modes, and states for autonomous aircraft
  • C/C++ programming
  • Python programming
  • Current, active in-scope US Government Secret security clearance or higher, with the ability to obtain Special Program Access (SAP)

Nice to have

  • Experience designing control laws for fixed wing aircraft and performing handling qualities analysis
  • Working knowledge of MIL-STD-1797 flying qualities requirements
  • Experience with autonomy algorithms (Autonomous Taxi/ Take Off and Landing, etc.) for driving control laws.
  • Experience with Lua Script programming.
  • Working knowledge of SAE-94910 performance requirements.

What the JD emphasized

  • Secret security clearance
  • US Government Secret