Job Description
Specialist Flight Control & GNC Engineer
(Pixhawk / ArduPilot)
About the company:
A UK-based uncrewed aviation company designing, building, and operating UAV platforms for critical services across healthcare, energy, and logistics. The company owns its core technology stack and runs live operations today.
The role:
This role owns flight control behavior, safety, and evidence for an existing, operational UAV platform using Pixhawk (Cube Orange) and ArduPilot.
This is not a research or greenfield autonomy role. The aircraft already flies. Your job is to make sure it flies predictably, repeatably, and defensibly — with strong configuration control, disciplined tuning, and regulator-ready evidence.
You are the flight control safety authority.
What you’ll be responsible for:
Flight control & GNC
* Own Pixhawk hardware configuration and ArduPilot parameters
* Tune and validate attitude, rate, altitude, velocity, and position controllers
* Own EKF configuration, innovation monitoring, and estimator health
* Enforce strict parameter management and version control
Reliability & integration
* Ensure correct integration of IMUs, GNSS, magnetometers, barometers, and airspeed
* Define calibration, alignment, redundancy, and isolation procedures
* Own failsafes, mode transitions, arming checks, and degraded modes
* Diagnose issues using flight logs and telemetry
Flight test & safety evidence
* Plan and execute structured flight tests (nominal + failure cases)
* Produce flight-test plans, reports, and log analysis
* Generate evidence supporting hazard analysis and SORA-style approvals
Leadership & collaboration
* Act as the flight control safety gatekeeper
* Work closely with airframe, autonomy, software, and operations teams
* Mentor engineers and block unsafe or weakly justified changes
What success looks like (12–18 months)
* Locked, version-controlled flight control baseline
* Consistent behaviour across aircraft and conditions
* Known and tested failure modes
* Clear, regulator-credible safety evidence
* Disciplined, repeatable flight testing
Requirements
Essential
* 5+ years in UAV flight control or GNC
* Deep hands-on Pixhawk (Cube Orange or similar) + ArduPilot experience
* Strong flight dynamics and control theory knowledge
* Proven flight log analysis and estimator debugging
* Hands-on flight test experience
* Experience supporting regulated or safety-critical operations