GNC Engineer II - Navigation

Pivotal is the leader in the emerging market of electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft. We design, develop, and manufacture light eVTOL aircraft and are renowned for the Black Fly aircraft the world's first light eVTOL to fly manned missions and enter the consumer market.

Efficient, compact, and simple, Pivotal aircraft are designed for a wide range of consumer, public service, and defense applications. Our distinctive tilt-aircraft architecture and scalable platform have been flying for over 10 years. Last year we announced our next-generation aircraft, the Helix, which is rapidly progressing toward general release and scalable production in 2026.

Mobility is one of the most highly-valued areas of modern technology investments. This is the right company, in the right space, the right strategy, at the right time. If you are ready for adventure, we invite you to join our amazing team and grow with us.

The GNC team at Pivotal develops the flight control and navigation algorithms that let our aircraft fly safely and precisely, including on the Helix family of aircraft. We are looking for a GNC Engineer II who focuses on navigation to design, implement, and verify the state estimation and sensor fusion algorithms. These algorithms estimate the aircraft’s attitude, heading, position, velocity, and other critical states in real time.

You will work across the full development lifecycle. That includes characterizing sensors and designing algorithms in MATLAB and Simulink, deploying them on embedded flight hardware, testing them in simulation and hardware-in-the-loop, and analyzing flight test data. You will work closely with the flight controls, firmware, avionics, autonomy, systems engineering, and flight test teams.

The ideal candidate has a solid grounding in estimation theory and hands-on experience taking a filter from design all the way to real sensor data or hardware. Experience with aircraft navigation systems, GNSS/INS integration, and eVTOL or UAV platforms is highly desirable.

• Design, implement, and tune state estimation algorithms, such as extended and error-state Kalman filters and complementary filters, to estimate attitude, heading, position, velocity, AGL, and air-data states.
• Develop sensor fusion architectures that combine IMU, GNSS, magnetometer, barometric and air-data sensors, and other aiding sources such as radar or lidar altimeters and vision.
• Develop sensor fault detection and isolation, integrity monitoring, and redundancy management, and define how navigation should behave in degraded modes.
• Analyze observability, filter consistency, and navigation error budgets to inform requirements and design trade-offs.

• Develop sensor error models (bias, scale factor, misalignment, noise, latency) and characterize sensors through bench testing and methods such as Allan variance.
• Support sensor selection, mounting, alignment, and calibration, including magnetometer hard- and soft-iron calibration and IMU alignment.
• Work with the firmware and avionics teams on sensor interfaces, timing and synchronization, and integration onto the aircraft.

• Implement navigation algorithms in MATLAB and Simulink so they are ready for code generation and real-time execution on embedded flight hardware.
• Develop and maintain navigation and sensor models within the GNC simulation environment.
• Take part in design and code reviews, version control, and continuous integration practices.

• Define and verify navigation requirements through unit tests, Monte Carlo simulation, software- and hardware-in-the-loop testing, and ground and flight tests.
• Plan, support, and…