Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) Engineer (R4815)

• Design and implement ship-relative guidance for approach, station keeping, alignment, and terminal recovery.
• Develop deck-motion compensation and landing-timing strategies that account for navigation uncertainty, aircraft response, control authority, and touchdown or capture constraints.
• Work closely with state estimation and sensing teams to define relative-navigation requirements and ensure recovery guidance remains robust to measurement errors, latency, and intermittent sensor availability.
• 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 testing, and hardware-in-the-loop testing.
• Support test planning, flight readiness assessments, and flight operations. Analyze test data, diagnose performance shortfalls, and drive improvements between tests.
• Provide technical direction within the recovery-guidance effort, mentor engineers, and communicate design decisions, limitations, and test results across teams.

• Demonstrated hands-on experience designing, implementing, and flight-testing guidance laws for autonomous shipboard recovery, including recovery using 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 the closed-loop effects of navigation bias, noise, latency, and dropouts.
• Strong background in flight dynamics and guidance and control, including the relationship between guidance demands, aircraft tracking bandwidth, and available control authority.
• Proficiency in C++ for real-time algorithm implementation and MATLAB/Simulink or Python for algorithm development and analysis.
• Experience executing verification and validation through simulation, hardware integration, flight testing, and post-flight analysis.
• Demonstrated ability to own a technical capability, resolve problems across subsystem boundaries, and work effectively with navigation, controls, software, and test engineers.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance.

• Full-scale, at-sea flight-test experience with autonomous shipboard recovery.
• VTOL or rotorcraft experience involving precision recovery to constrained or significantly moving landing platforms.
• Experience characterizing recovery performance across ship motion, wind over deck, ship airwake, turbulence, and degraded visibility.
• Experience integrating vision, infrared, lidar, radar, or cooperative RF sensing into a relative-navigation and recovery system.
• Experience supporting ship–aircraft dynamic-interface testing, recovery-envelope development, flight safety, or airworthiness.
• Familiarity with Linux-based development, Git, automated testing, and CI/CD workflows.
• Ability to obtain S//SAR access.

#LE

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/.

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