Flight Guidance & Motion Planning Engineer
ParisFull-timePosted 2mo ago
About the role
Flight Guidance & Motion Planning Engineer responsible for motion planning, trajectory generation, and guidance laws for high-speed autonomous flight. Delivery of onboard planning, handling noisy inputs from perception and estimator, and interface with control loop. Role involves evaluating classical vs learning-based methods, simulation-to-flight validation, and mentoring junior engineers.
Responsibilities
- Motion Planning: Plan dynamically feasible paths onboard, including obstacle avoidance, replanning as the situation changes, and perception-aware planning.
- Trajectory Generation: Turn those paths into feasible references under airframe and actuator limits, handed cleanly to the control loop.
- Guidance Laws: Design the laws that steer the aircraft along the reference and hold it there.
- Interfaces & Perception Coupling: Own the input contracts for the ego-state from Navigation and the perception pipeline, and handle their latency, rate, and dropout, including behavior when an input drops.
- Mode & Failsafe Logic: Across cruise, loiter, and approach, including lost-link behavior.
- Flight Test & Diagnosis: Verify across simulation, SITL, and HITL, including Monte Carlo campaigns, then fly and iterate from logs.
- Mentorship: Depending on seniority, support the team by mentoring junior engineers.
Qualifications
- A strong academic record with a degree in aerospace, robotics, GNC, or a related STEM field. A practical track record matters more than the specific degree.
- Proven experience with onboard motion planning, trajectory generation, and tracking, and with guidance laws on flying platforms.
- Hands-on experience closing a control loop on a perception output, handling latency and dropout.
- Familiarity with learning-based planning or guidance and simulation-based training, with the judgment to weigh it against classical approaches.
- Systems-minded and pragmatic about failure modes and imperfect inputs, disciplined about simulation and validation.
- Communicates clearly, able to present guidance and test results to engineers and senior stakeholders.
- Thrives under pressure in a fast-paced environment with a no-task-is-too-small mentality.
- Bonus: Experience with vision-based or perception-coupled guidance.
- Commitment to Harmattan AI's mission of providing a defensive edge to allied nations through ethical, high-impact technology.
Skills
Required:Motion PlanningTrajectory GenerationGuidance LawsPerception-Coupled ControlCommunication
Nice to have:Learning-Based Methods
Last updated Aug 5, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Harmattan AI
Building the Future of Autonomous Warfare.
Building the Future of Autonomous Warfare.
Autonomous WarfareUASPayloadCounter-UAS
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