Senior Guidance and Control Engineer

At the Autonomous Robotics Research Centre (ARRC) of TII, Senior Engineers are more than just individual contributors; they are the technical anchors of our team. In this role, you will spend roughly 75% of your time heavily hands‑on with GNC algorithm design, C++ development, field experiments, and data analysis. For the remaining 25%, you will be expected to step up as a technical mentor—driving project planning, aligning interfaces with other teams, and guiding the work of junior engineers.

If you are a highly technical engineer who enjoys taking ownership of a project's direction without stepping away from the code, we want to talk to you.

• Act as the technical authority for the GNC team, defining the software architecture and ensuring the integrity of the guidance and control framework.
• Drive technical project planning, create development timelines, and adapt roadmaps to meet external stakeholder requests and evolving mission requirements.
• Define work packages and establish clear, rigid interfaces between various system modules to ensure clean integration across the architecture.
• Provide day‑to‑day technical mentorship and code reviews for mid‑level and junior engineers, fostering a culture of high engineering standards.
• Serve as the primary technical point of contact, aligning GNC deliverables with avionics, integration, platform, and flight test teams.

• Architect, implement, and evaluate advanced guidance strategies for different flight phases, with a strong emphasis on loitering, mid‑course, and terminal/dive guidance.
• Develop and optimize classical and modern guidance laws (PNG, Augmented PNG, L1, Pure Pursuit, predictive/optimization‑based approaches).
• Design robust guidance solutions capable of handling targets detected by multiple sensor modalities under highly dynamic conditions.

• Actively prototype and validate core guidance and control algorithms in MATLAB/Simulink, treating this as a critical first step in the development pipeline.
• Directly translate and optimize these prototype models into production‑ready, highly efficient C/C++ code for embedded deployment.
• Act as a primary contributor to the codebase, writing industry‑grade C++ and Python.
• Execute ROS/ROS2 C++ development and integration, strictly adhering to software engineering best practices (version control, unit testing, CI/CD, Docker).
• Review peer code to ensure efficiency, readability, and architectural consistency across the UAV software stack.
• Collaborate with navigation and integration teams to ensure robust end‑to‑end system performance.

• Design, build, and maintain high‑fidelity simulation environments to benchmark guidance law performance.
• Actively participate in real‑world flight test campaigns and field experiments.
• Conduct deep data analysis on flight logs, identify performance gaps, and rapidly iterate on algorithms to improve robustness and precision.

• Education:
  
  Master’s degree or Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Control, or a related highly technical field.
• Experience:
  
  7+ years of hands‑on experience in GNC algorithm development for UAVs or autonomous systems, including proven experience guiding projects or mentoring engineers.
• Coding Proficiency:
  Expert‑level proficiency in C/C++ and Python for production environments. Deep expertise in MATLAB/Simulink and automatic code generation tools.
• Systems Knowledge:
  Strong knowledge of ROS2, PX4, and modern control system design tools.
• Hands‑On Mentality:
  Demonstrated ability to remain a primary code contributor while steering a project; you must be comfortable prototyping in MATLAB, writing in C++, performing field experiments, and analyzing flight data.
• Technical Breadth:
  Solid understanding of flight dynamics, aerodynamics, sensor fusion, and state estimation algorithms.
• Project Management:
  Experience driving engineering timelines, managing technical debt in a fast‑paced environment, and familiarity with task management tools (Jira or similar).
• Communication:
  Strong ability to translate complex technical challenges into clear project plans for multidisciplinary teams and stakeholders.