Senior GNC Engineer

Location: Torrance, California, United States

Salary: $163,500–$228,500 USD per year, base salary only; equity grants may also be included in total compensation.

Company

hirify.global is a defense technology company designing and manufacturing high-performance unmanned systems for modern battlefield applications.

What you will do

• Own terminal guidance and the associated control path across unmanned aircraft.
• Develop guidance laws, aimpoint commands, achievable-acceleration management, and interfaces to flight control.
• Improve engagement accuracy against maneuvering targets under imperfect state estimates, degraded sensor tracking, and limited late-engagement control authority.
• Deliver guidance and control software to physical air vehicles and participate in flight and field testing.
• Analyze test data through log-based replay, onboard-decision reconstruction, and root-cause investigation of anomalous engagements.
• Plan tests, define instrumentation requirements, support range operations, and review post-test data.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional experience developing guidance, navigation, and control software for missiles, interceptors, guided munitions, unmanned aircraft, or comparable autonomous vehicles.
• Expert knowledge of terminal homing guidance, including proportional and augmented proportional navigation, zero-effort-miss formulations, time-to-go estimation, lead-pursuit geometry, and miss-distance analysis.
• Demonstrated delivery of guidance or control software onto a physical air vehicle that has flown.
• Production proficiency in C++ and Python, including embedded or real-time development under deterministic execution and latency constraints.
• Experience with state estimation, sensor fusion, Kalman and extended Kalman filtering, flight dynamics, control loops, actuator saturation, coordinate frames, timing, latency, and uncertainty representation.
• Direct experience with flight or field test operations and closed-loop evaluation using real test data.

Nice to have

• Terminal guidance experience against surface or ground targets, including aimpoint selection and impact-angle or impact-point shaping.
• Experience with safety-critical decision logic, engagement authorization, abort criteria, or failsafe behavior.
• Deterministic, reproducible flight-critical software design, including bit-exact replay from logged data.
• Background in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or mature closed-loop evaluation with regression suites and scenario libraries.

Culture & Benefits

• Fast-paced, hands-on startup environment focused on moving systems from design to deployment.
• Work on unmanned systems tested in combat and produced at scale.
• Highly competitive equity grants are considered part of total compensation.
• Equal opportunity employment is provided without regard to protected characteristics.