Temporary Flight Control Engineer – UAV Safety & Validation

wpi; Maryland; On-site; USD 25,000 - 28,000; Part time

Job summary

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) is seeking a Temporary Research Engineer to design, prove out, and fly safety-critical control systems for multirotor aircraft. You will develop control and runtime-assurance methods with real guarantees, then push them onto flight hardware and validate them in the air.

You will write production-quality C++ for real-time execution on embedded flight computers, integrate with ROS 2/MAVLink, and perform extensive flight tests and analyses to close the loop

Qualifications

• MS in Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Robotics, Computer Science, or a closely related field.
• Strong foundation in nonlinear control and dynamics: Lyapunov analysis, optimal control, state estimation, and rigid-body dynamics.
• Demonstrated experience with UAV or multirotor control, in research.
• Proficiency in C++ (C++14 or later) and Python, including software running on real hardware rather than only in simulation.
• Experience taking an algorithm from derivation through simulation to hardware validation.
• Clear technical writing and the ability to explain a proof and a bug with equal precision.

Responsibilities

• Safety-critical control design.
• Develop and analyze control algorithms for quadrotors and other multirotors, including geometric control on SE(3), nonlinear MPC, robust and adaptive control, and disturbance observers.
• Design safety filters and constraint-enforcement layers using methods such as control barrier functions, reachability analysis, and contraction metrics.
• Derive and document stability, robustness, and safety guarantees, including the assumptions under which they hold and how they fail.
• Write production-quality C++ for real-time execution on embedded flight computers, with Python for analysis and prototyping.
• Integrate with flight stacks and middleware such as ROS 2, and MAVLink.
• Meet real-time constraints on limited compute, and profile and optimize control loops accordingly.
• Run Monte Carlo campaigns, software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop testing, and adversarial and edge-case scenario suites.
• Plan and execute flight test campaigns: write test cards, define abort criteria, support flight ops, and analyze logs afterward.
• Close the loop between flight data and models, and update the models when reality disagrees.

Skills

Nonlinear control

Model Predictive Control

UAV control

C++14+

Python

Real-time embedded

Education

MS in Aerospace Engineering / Electrical Engineering / Mechanical Engineering / Robotics / CS

Tools

ROS 2

MAVLink

Job description

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) is seeking a Temporary Research Engineer to design, prove out, and fly safety-critical control systems for multirotor aircraft. You will develop control and runtime-assurance methods with real guarantees, then push them onto flight hardware and validate them in the air.

You will write production-quality C++ for real-time execution on embedded flight computers, integrate with ROS 2/MAVLink, and perform extensive flight tests and analyses to close the loop