Staff Guidance Navigation And Controls Engineer

• 5+ years of professional experience in guidance, navigation, and control (GNC/G&C) for aerospace vehicles, ideally with UAVs or autonomous aircraft.
• Evidence of staff/senior-level scope: owning a production codebase, leading a technical area, or being the named point of contact for a subsystem across teams.
• Hands-on flight software development experience in C/C++ (Rust or similar acceptable), with the ability to write production code.
• Production-level code review experience, including reviewing others’ flight-critical or safety-critical code.
• Experience as the owner or maintainer of a vehicle or autopilot codebase.
• Flight test support experience, including participation in flight test campaigns, checkouts, or live flight operations for aircraft/UAVs.
• Experience with flight data review and analysis to include
• Analyzing flight logs and telemetry
• Troubleshooting anomalies
• Triaging in-flight issues
• Familiarity with flight readiness processes to include
• Flight Readiness Reviews (FRR)
• Pre-flight test (PFT) checkouts
• Release/signoff processes for flight software

• Cross-team technical coordination experience, acting as the G&C/flight software representative to hardware, autonomy, mission software, reliability, or test teams.
• Autonomy experience to include
• Platform autonomy vs. mission-level autonomy
• Autopilot features
• Autonomous flight behaviors
• Reliability or health management (HM) experience, including fault detection, health monitoring, or reliability engineering for flight software.
• Proven ability to turn high-level goals into a technical roadmap and deliver features across releases.
• Experience mentoring or overseeing other engineers (e.g., reliability engineers, junior GNC engineers).
• Technical interviewing experience, including participation in hiring loops.
• Technical writing experience, including release notes, technical publications, and engineering documentation.
• Familiarity with continuous integration/release management for flight software (standups, release trains, versioning).
• Experience with VTOL or tail-sitter UAVs.
• Experience improving usability of operator-facing flight software or ground control interfaces.
• Contributions to open-source autopilots (PX4, ArduPilot, Auterion, etc.).
• Simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing experience.

#LD

Full-time regular employee offer package

Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity

Temporary employee offer package

Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)

Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location. All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check. Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits. Please speak to your talent acquisition representative for more information.

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Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai https://shield.ai/.

Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/shield-ai, X https://x.com/shieldaitech, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/shield_ai, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@Shield_AI.