Senior Systems Engineer – GNC & Flight Controls (Aerospace)

Location: On-site at the HQ office in Palo Alto, California; applicants must be eligible for employment in the United States.

Salary: $150,000–$180,000 per year

Company

hirify.global designs, develops, and manufactures light electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft for consumer, public service, and defense applications.

What you will do

• Develop, decompose, allocate, and maintain requirements for GNC, flight controls, estimation, sensing, embedded software, and supporting hardware.
• Own Jama requirements artifacts, traceability, baselines, change management, verification methods, and objective evidence.
• Define verification and validation plans, matrices, procedures, and reports across analysis, simulation, SIL, HIL, bench, ground, UAV, and crewed flight testing.
• Manage interfaces between GNC, flight-control software, sensors, actuators, flight computers, electrical systems, and aircraft dynamics.
• Support integration, aircraft bring-up, anomaly investigation, root-cause analysis, and requirements closure.
• Work with GNC, embedded software, electrical, aeromechanical, autonomy, safety, and flight-test teams during technical and flight-readiness reviews.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in aerospace, electrical, mechanical, computer, systems engineering, robotics, or a related discipline.
• 5+ years of experience developing complex aerospace, automotive, robotics, autonomous, or other safety-critical electromechanical systems.
• Strong requirements-engineering and verification-and-validation experience, including decomposition, allocation, traceability, interfaces, change management, and verification closure.
• Experience with Jama or comparable tools such as DOORS, Polarion, or Codebeamer.
• Technical experience with GNC, flight controls, controls engineering, vehicle dynamics, state estimation, autonomous systems, or related systems.
• Working knowledge of MATLAB, Simulink, C/C++, Python, Git, embedded software workflows, and SIL/HIL or other requirements-based testing.

Nice to have

• Experience with flight-control systems, GNC, avionics, autonomous aircraft, UAVs, spacecraft, or other flight-critical systems.
• Knowledge of DO-178C, DO-331, ARP4754A/ARP4754B, ARP4761, ISO 26262, ISO 21448/SOTIF, Automotive SPICE, or UL 4600.
• Experience with failure behavior, degraded modes, redundancy, fault detection, automated regression testing, CI/CD, Jira, or GitLab.
• Experience supporting ground or flight-test programs and investigating discrepancies between predicted and actual vehicle behavior.

Culture & Benefits

• Safety-focused engineering culture with emphasis on risk identification and mitigation.
• Cross-functional collaboration across hardware, software, controls, test, safety, and program teams.
• Medical, dental, vision, and 401(k) benefits.
• Equal-opportunity workplace with a collaborative and respectful working environment.