Senior GNC Engineer
Los Angeles, CA$120k - $220kFull-timePosted 8mo ago
About the role
Senior GNC Engineer at Icarus, a YC-backed aerospace startup building solar-powered stratospheric aircraft that fly at 60,000 ft.
Responsibilities
- Design, implement, and fly guidance, navigation, and control systems for long-endurance stratospheric aircraft
- Own the GNC stack end to end: modeling, simulation, control law design, estimation, tuning, validation, and flight test
- Develop and maintain vehicle dynamics models and simulation environments
- Design and tune controllers for launch, climb, station-keeping, loiter, descent, and recovery
- Integrate GNC tightly with avionics, sensors, propulsion, and autonomy software
- Debug and iterate rapidly using flight data, hardware-in-the-loop, and field testing
- Support integration, production bring-up, and flight operations in the desert
Qualifications
- 2+ years working on real GNC systems for aircraft, UAVs, spacecraft, or similarly complex dynamic systems
- Strong fundamentals in dynamics, controls, estimation, and linear systems
- Experience with state estimation (EKF/UKF), sensor fusion, and inertial navigation
- Experience designing and tuning control systems that fly on real vehicles
- Comfortable working from first principles and validating with test and flight data
- Ability to move fast, own outcomes, and troubleshoot in the field
Skills
Required:GNC system designState estimation (EKF/UKF)Control systems tuning
Benefits
- Meaningful equity
- Top market salary and bonuses
- Health, dental, and vision insurance
- Factory in El Segundo
- Real ownership, real hardware, real flight
- Small team, massive responsibility
- High signal (engineering) to noise (management) culture
- Dream desk setup
- Daily lunch
- Unlimited Celsius
Last updated Sep 16, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Icarus
Stratospheric birds for defense
Always-on intelligence and connectivity for Defense. Icarus builds autonomous, solar-powered aircraft that fly at 60,000 feet for weeks at a time, above the clouds harnessing the power of the Sun, but never too close. Acting as a Cell Tower in the Sky, it’s the U-2 spy plane reborn in 2025, except each costs $100K and is built by the thousands. The future of warfare is persistent swarms in the Stratosphere.
hardwareswarm-roboticsaerospace
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