Description
Position OverviewAs a Senior Flight Controls Engineer, you will collaborate with peers to:
- Lead development of flight control for autonomous fixed-wing aircraft. You will shape its architecture and roadmap, lead design reviews, and hold the bar on code quality
- Own the aircraft modelling behind the control system, including trim and operating-point models, actuator and propulsion models, and the simulations used to design and verify control laws
- Stay hands-on: design and tune control laws yourself, write production C++, and review the hardest changes
- Represent control in design reviews with the navigation, state estimation, hardware, and flight-test teams, and mentor the engineers who join the team
- Work with flight-test engineers and safety pilots to plan and fly test campaigns, tune control laws during and after flights, and turn pilot feedback into improvements
Your key objectives will include:
- Building and maintaining high-fidelity models of real aircraft from first principles (6-DOF equations of motion, aerodynamic coefficients, mass and inertia, propulsion and actuator dynamics), refined by system identification from flight data
- Trimming and linearising the aircraft across its envelope, and using the results to design, analyze, and schedule control laws (e.g. stability margins, robustness to model uncertainty)
- Designing and tuning control laws for automatic takeoff and landing: ground roll, rotation, crosswind technique, glide-path tracking, flare, touchdown, rollout, and go-around
- Designing energy management and lateral path following (e.g. TECS, L1 or similar nonlinear guidance) that hold up in wind and turbulence
- Implementing envelope protection and failure handling (e.g. stall, bank, load factor, and actuator limits), and safe handover of control to and from the safety pilot
- Taking control laws from design and analysis to production C++ that meets safety-critical standards, verified in closed-loop simulation (SIL/HIL) and flight test
Other Details:
- No. of Positions: 1
- Duration: Permanent Full-Time, starting December 2026
- Base Compensation: 153920 to 168480
- This is a hybrid role involving remote work and on-site presence to support field tests-you must be in the Greater Toronto Area or willing to relocate
- Competitive and comprehensive compensation (e.g. 3 weeks of vacation upon joining, comprehensive health and wellness plans)
- You must be eligible to hold a Government of Canada security clearance at the Reliability or Secret level, and pass security assessment for the Controlled Goods Program
QualificationsAs the ideal candidate, you meet the following requirements:
- A university degree in aerospace, mechanical, or electrical engineering, or a related field
- Hands-on experience designing control laws that have flown on real aircraft, including tuning and validating them in flight test
- MATLAB/Simulink and/or Python for modelling, analysis, and system identification, and C++ for implementing control laws on real-time systems
- A strong foundation in flight dynamics: equations of motion, aerodynamic modelling, stability derivatives, trim, and linearisation
- Experience identifying aircraft models from flight or test data (e.g. frequency-domain, output-error, and equation-error methods)
- Experience designing and analyzing aircraft control, both classical (cascaded loops, gain scheduling, anti-windup) and model-based (e.g. LQR, NDI/INDI, MPC)
- Experience with the takeoff and landing phases, including automatic landing, flare laws, and ground dynamics
- Experience with flight simulators (e.g. X-Plane, JSBSim, FlightGear, Simulink 6-DOF models)
Preferred and bonus qualifications include experience with:
- Developing and/or flight-testing autonomous aircraft or drones in a professional setting
- Modelling fixed-wing general aviation aircraft, including propeller and piston-engine propulsion
- A pilot licence, or experience as a flight-test engineer
- Wind, gust, and turbulence models (e.g. Dryden, von Karman, wind shear)
- Autoland, or certifying flight-control software (e.g. DO-178C, DO-331)
- Code generation from models (e.g. MATLAB Coder, Embedded Coder) and safety-critical coding standards (e.g. MISRA C++)
You also possess the soft skills to work in a high-stakes, tight-knit company, such as:
- Openness to give and receive feedback
- Adaptability when priorities move
- Self-awareness about your own strengths and gaps
- Taking initiative with minimal guidance
Compensation
$153,920.00 - $168,480.00 per year
