Senior VTOL Flight Controls Engineer (GNC)

Mosaic.tech; New York (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity packages

Health, dental, and vision insurance (

Job summary

Valinor is building the next generation of autonomous VTOL aircraft for defense and enterprise applications. We seek a Flight Controls & GNC Engineer to own the guidance, navigation, and control stack on our VTOL platform.

This senior individual contributor role demands ownership of flight performance—from control law architecture to day-of-demo parameter tuning. You’ll work closely with the Chief Engineer and a small cross-functional team, serving as the technical authority on transition

Qualifications

• 4+ years of hands-on flight controls or GNC engineering experience on real flying hardware.
• Deep familiarity with PX4 (or comparable open-source autopilot) — you’ve tuned it, debugged it, and modified it
• Experience with fixed-wing or VTOL platforms
• Ability to read and interpret flight logs to diagnose control system issues (PX4 log analysis, PlotJuggler)
• Familiarity with aerodynamic modeling pipelines (CFD output → stability derivatives → flight dynamics model)
• Scripting ability in Python for log analysis, simulation, and tooling; MATLAB/Simulink experience for control design and 6DOF modeling is equally valued
• Strong fundamentals: classical and modern control theory, rigid body dynamics, state estimation
• Comfortable in the field, you’ve executed flight tests, not just designed them on paper

Responsibilities

• Own the full GNC stack on our drone: PX4 code, VTOL transition logic, fixed-wing control laws (TECS, NPFG, attitude/rate loops), multicopter controller
• Design, implement, and iterate on control laws; translate theoretical controller designs into flight-validated parameters, and test them in the field to tune the aircraft
• Conduct structured flight test campaigns — define test cards, instrument logging, execute in-field, and close the loop with data-driven analysis
• Debug flight anomalies from logs: identify root cause across sensor, estimator, controller, and actuator layers

Skills

PX4

GNC engineering

VTOL platforms

Python scripting

MATLAB/Simulink

Flight testing

Tools

PlotJuggler

CFD

Simulink

Job description

Valinor is building the next generation of autonomous VTOL aircraft for defense and enterprise applications. We seek a Flight Controls & GNC Engineer to own the guidance, navigation, and control stack on our VTOL platform.

This senior individual contributor role demands ownership of flight performance—from control law architecture to day-of-demo parameter tuning. You’ll work closely with the Chief Engineer and a small cross-functional team, serving as the technical authority on transition