Flight Controls Engineer (Autonomous Shipboard Recovery)

Location: Seattle, Washington; Dallas, Texas; or San Diego, California. On-site.

Company

hirify.global's X-BAT Division develops autonomous shipboard recovery capabilities for X-BAT aircraft.

What you will do

• Design and implement ship-relative guidance for approach, station keeping, alignment, and terminal recovery.
• Develop deck-motion compensation, landing-timing strategies, recovery sequencing, and contingency logic for hold, wave-off, go-around, retry, and degraded or lost navigation.
• Integrate real-time C++ guidance software with relative navigation, flight controls, autonomy, embedded software, and recovery hardware.
• Define recovery performance requirements and verify them through 6DOF simulation, Monte Carlo analysis, software-in-the-loop, and hardware-in-the-loop testing.
• Support test planning, flight readiness assessments, flight operations, flight-test data analysis, and performance improvements.
• Provide technical direction, mentor engineers, and communicate design decisions, limitations, and test results across teams.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience designing, implementing, and flight-testing guidance laws for autonomous shipboard recovery, including relative-navigation recovery without GPS/GNSS.
• Strong understanding of moving-platform guidance, ship-relative reference frames, deck motion, and terminal position, velocity, and attitude constraints.
• Experience integrating guidance with relative-navigation systems and assessing closed-loop effects of navigation bias, noise, latency, and dropouts.
• Strong background in flight dynamics and guidance and control, including guidance demands, aircraft tracking bandwidth, and available control authority.
• Proficiency in C++ for real-time algorithm implementation and MATLAB/Simulink or Python for algorithm development and analysis.
• Experience with verification and validation through simulation, hardware integration, flight testing, and post-flight analysis.
• Ability to own a technical capability, resolve problems across subsystem boundaries, and work with navigation, controls, software, and test engineers.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance.

Nice to have

• Full-scale, at-sea flight-test experience with autonomous shipboard recovery.
• VTOL or rotorcraft experience involving precision recovery to constrained or significantly moving landing platforms.
• Experience characterizing recovery performance across ship motion, wind over deck, ship airwake, turbulence, and degraded visibility.
• Experience integrating vision, infrared, lidar, radar, or cooperative RF sensing into relative-navigation and recovery systems.
• Experience supporting ship-aircraft dynamic-interface testing, recovery-envelope development, flight safety, or airworthiness.
• Familiarity with Linux-based development, Git, automated testing, and CI/CD workflows.
• Ability to obtain S//SAR access.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time employee position.
• Work is performed on-site within the X-BAT Engineering - Software department.
• Collaboration spans navigation, controls, software, autonomy, embedded software, recovery-system, and test engineering teams.