Guidance Navigation Controls Engineer

About the Role

Northrop Grumman's Aeronautics Systems – Research & Advanced Design (R&AD) is seeking a Guidance Navigation Controls Engineer to join their team. This position can be filled in Rancho Bernardo, CA or Roy, Utah. The selected candidate should thrive in a fast-paced work environment with high expectations and collaborative/team settings. This dynamic organization is involved in deploying forward-leaning avionics, guidance, navigation, and control systems for developmental concepts for air vehicles, weapons, and other platforms.

Key Responsibilities

• Support research and development of flight control algorithms for manned and unmanned air vehicles.
• Design, develop, implement, verify, and test algorithms, software, and simulation tools to perform guidance, navigation and control (GNC) of autonomous unmanned aircraft.
• Develop control laws to meet air vehicle performance, flying qualities, and stability margin requirements, both on ground and in flight.
• Design outer and inner loop control laws, and associated logic and autonomy functions.
• Develop air vehicle system linear and non-linear dynamic simulation models and integrate models into software and hardware-in-the-loop simulation environments.
• Perform performance and flying qualities analysis.
• Support non-linear simulation and hardware-in-the-loop lab testing.
• Support flight test activities and analyze air vehicle flight test data.
• Develop analysis to support design reviews at different stages in a development program.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• MATLAB
• Simulink
• Fixed-wing aircraft flight dynamics
• Linear control principles
• Non-linear simulations of aircraft closed-loop dynamics
• Outer and/or inner loop control law performance requirements
• Logic, modes, and states for autonomous aircraft
• Travel: Willing to travel up to 20% of the time.
• Clearance: Ability to obtain a US Government Secret security clearance or higher and Special Program Access (SAP).

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (STEM) discipline and 2 years of related engineering experience OR a Master’s degree in a relevant STEM discipline with 0 years of related engineering experience.
• Working knowledge of fixed-wing aircraft flight dynamics.
• Familiarity with linear control principles and tools to design feedback control systems.
• Working knowledge of analyzing non-linear simulations of aircraft closed-loop dynamics.
• Working knowledge of outer and/or inner loop control law performance requirements.
• Experience using MATLAB to create, process, analyze, and visually represent data.
• Experience using Simulink to model dynamic systems.
• Working knowledge of logic, modes, and states for autonomous aircraft.

Preferred Qualifications

• Current, active in-scope US Government Secret security clearance or higher, with the ability to obtain Special Program Access (SAP).
• Experience designing control laws for fixed wing aircraft.
• Familiarity with MIL-STD-1797 flying qualities requirements.
• Familiarity with autonomy algorithms (Autonomous Taxi/ Take Off And Landing, etc.) for driving control laws.
• Familiarity with Simulink Stateflow Modeling.
• Familiarity with autocoding Simulink models.
• Familiarity with C/C++ programming.
• Familiarity with Python programming.
• Experience with Lua Script programming.