F-ADA

Founding GNC Engineer.

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The Role

F-ADA is seeking a skilled and motivated Guidance, Navigation, and Controls (GNC) Engineer to lead control algorithms for quadcopters, fixed wings, and other unmanned systems. As a founding team member you will have the opportunity to work on real problems from day one, take on an incredible amount of responsibility in a high ownership environment, and grow with the company as we scale.

As part of this role, you will own the design, implementation, and testing of new control algorithms. You will support existing contracts and lead the development of new capabilities from a controls perspective.

Key Responsibilities

  • Design, implement, and tune real-time guidance, navigation, and control algorithms for quadcopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and other unmanned systems.
  • Develop vision-in-the-loop control systems that fuse camera, IMU, and flight-controller data to guide vehicles in GPS-denied or sensor-constrained environments.
  • Develop and maintain simulation environments, test harnesses, and metrics for evaluating system behavior before flight.
  • Work closely with perception, embedded, and hardware engineers to deliver end-to-end autonomous capabilities.
  • Support active customer programs while defining and leading the controls roadmap for new unmanned-system capabilities.

Required Qualifications

  • Strong foundation in classical and modern control theory, including PID, LQR, MPC, nonlinear control, or related methods.
  • Experience designing, implementing, and tuning control algorithms for robotics, autonomous vehicles, aircraft, drones, or similar dynamic systems.
  • Proficiency in Python and C++ for algorithm development, simulation, analysis, and production implementation.
  • Experience with simulation and testing environments such as ROS 2, ArduPilot SITL, PX4 SITL, Gazebo, MuJoCo, or equivalent tools.
  • Ability to independently debug complex hardware/software systems and turn flight-test data into clear engineering decisions.
  • Eligible to work on U.S. defense programs; ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance if required.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience with autonomous drone guidance, target tracking, terminal guidance, pursuit/interception, or precision landing.
  • Part 107 Remote Pilot
  • Experience developing for embedded or edge-compute platforms such as NVIDIA Jetson, Raspberry Pi, STM32, or similar systems.
  • Contributions to open-source robotics or autopilot projects, especially PX4, ArduPilot, ROS, OpenCV, or related autonomy tooling.