Senior Stratospheric GNC Architect

Icarus; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful equity

Top market salary and bonuses

Health, dental, and vision insurance

Factory in El Segundo

Daily lunch

Unlimited Celsius

Job summary

Icarus in El Segundo is building solar-powered stratospheric aircraft designed for weeks-long flights. We seek engineers to design, implement, and fly GNC systems, owning the stack end to end from modeling to flight tests, in a fast-paced, hardware-driven environment.

You will work on robust dynamics, sensor fusion, and control design, validating against test data and field flights, with strong emphasis on speed and hands-on execution.

Qualifications

• 2+ years working on real GNC systems for aircraft, UAVs, spacecraft, or similarly complex dynamic systems.
• Strong fundamentals in dynamics, controls, estimation, and linear systems.
• Experience with state estimation (EKF/UKF), sensor fusion, and inertial navigation.
• Experience designing and tuning control systems that fly on real vehicles.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and fly guidance, navigation, and control systems for long-endurance stratospheric aircraft.
• Own the GNC stack end to end: modeling, simulation, control law design, estimation, tuning, validation, and flight test.
• Develop and maintain vehicle dynamics models and simulation environments.
• Design and tune controllers for launch, climb, station-keeping, loiter, descent, and recovery.
• Integrate GNC tightly with avionics, sensors, propulsion, and autonomy software.
• Debug and iterate rapidly using flight data, hardware-in-the-loop, and field testing.
• Support integration, production bring-up, and flight operations in the desert.

Skills

GNC system design

Dynamics and controls

State estimation (EKF/UKF)

Sensor fusion

Inertial navigation

Field testing

Job description

Icarus in El Segundo is building solar-powered stratospheric aircraft designed for weeks-long flights. We seek engineers to design, implement, and fly GNC systems, owning the stack end to end from modeling to flight tests, in a fast-paced, hardware-driven environment.

You will work on robust dynamics, sensor fusion, and control design, validating against test data and field flights, with strong emphasis on speed and hands-on execution.