Controls Engineer

Controls Engineer – Liquid Piston

Location:

Bloomfield, CT | Fully onsite, 5 days per week Liquid Piston is currently located in Bloomfield, CT and will be relocating to Suffield, CT later in 2026.

Liquid Piston is an advanced propulsion technology company developing compact, high-efficiency engine and power system solutions for aerospace, defense, and commercial applications. Built around a patented rotary engine architecture, Liquid Piston is challenging conventional approaches to propulsion by developing smaller, lighter, more powerful, and more fuel-efficient systems. This is an opportunity to work on a fundamentally different engine architecture and solve controls challenges that don’t have a textbook answer.

Liquid Piston is seeking a Controls Engineer to design, develop, troubleshoot, and improve the control systems that operate our next-generation rotary engines and power systems. This is a hands‑on engineering role for someone who enjoys working on innovative technologies, understanding how a system behaves, identifying why it isn’t working as expected, and developing practical solutions. You won’t simply be tuning tables or working within a narrowly defined controls function.

You’ll work across the engine, genset, instrumentation, firmware, and test environment to understand problems at the system level and help drive them to resolution.

The Controls Engineer will work closely with mechanical engineers, engine performance engineers, technicians, and test engineers to develop and improve control strategies, implement firmware changes, analyze test data, and troubleshoot issues on real hardware.

The ideal candidate is curious, analytical, and comfortable getting into the details. You should be someone who can take a controls problem from ‘something isn’t working’ to understanding the root cause, developing a solution, implementing it, and validating the result.

This isn’t a role where you’ll spend your days maintaining an established controls system. You’ll be helping develop the controls that make a new generation of rotary engines and power systems work. You’ll have the opportunity to work directly with engineers and technicians, get onto the test floor, diagnose real problems, write and modify control logic, and see the results of your work on running hardware.

The systems are complex, the problems are challenging, and there is plenty of room to learn and make an impact. For an engineer who enjoys figuring out why something isn’t working, digging into the data, and then getting hands‑on to make it work, this role offers the chance to have a direct impact on technology that is being developed from the ground up.

• Develop, implement, and troubleshoot control strategies for Liquid Piston engines, gensets, and associated power systems.
• Develop and modify embedded control software and firmware for engine and power system applications.
• Work with engine, electrical, mechanical, and test engineers to define and implement control requirements.
• Analyze engine and system behavior using test data, instrumentation, and control-system diagnostics.
• Troubleshoot controls issues on test hardware and identify root causes rather than simply addressing symptoms.
• Develop control logic for engine operation, including starting, speed control, load management, protection, and shutdown strategies.
• Support integration of sensors, actuators, ECUs, and other control-system hardware.
• Develop and improve control algorithms and state machines.
• Participate in engine and genset testing and support troubleshooting directly in the test environment.
• Work with technicians and test engineers to reproduce and diagnose controls‑related problems.
• Implement firmware updates and validate changes through testing.
• Support calibration and optimization of control parameters as part of broader system development.
• Document control strategies, software changes, test results, and engineering decisions.
• Help establish and improve controls development, testing, and troubleshooting processes.
• Contribute to the development of next‑generation propulsion and power‑generation platforms.