Staff GNC Engineer at Apera Staff GNC Engineer at Apera in Los Altos, California Posted in about 18 hours ago.

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full-time An innovative aerospace company developing advanced conventional, electric, and autonomous aircraft is seeking a Staff GNC Engineer to provide technical leadership across guidance, navigation, flight controls, and state estimation. Responsibilities Own integrated GNC architecture across CTOL and VTOL aircraft platforms. Design and implement real-time C++ flight software for control, guidance, navigation, and state estimation. Develop multi-sensor fusion using IMU, air data, GNSS, perception, and external sensors . Apply modern control and estimation techniques, including optimal/robust control, Kalman filtering, nonlinear estimation, and optimisation-based methods . Perform stability, performance, and robustness analysis using C++ and Python . Develop simulation and flight-data analysis tools to support aircraft and algorithm development. Plan and execute flight-test activities to validate GNC performance. Work closely with perception, autonomy, and systems teams to deliver integrated sensor-to-actuator solutions. Provide technical leadership, architectural direction, and mentorship to GNC engineers. Required 10+ years' experience in GNC, flight controls, navigation, estimation, or related aerospace disciplines. Deep understanding of aircraft dynamics, control theory, state estimation, and sensor fusion . Proven experience developing real-time C++ flight software validated through flight testing. Strong C++ and Python skills, including simulation and dynamic-system analysis. Experience integrating inertial, air-data, GNSS, and/or perception measurements. Demonstrated technical leadership and experience owning system architecture. Desired Experience with CTOL and VTOL/eVTOL aircraft . Vision-aided navigation or perception-integrated state estimation. Factor-graph/optimisation frameworks such as Ceres, GTSAM, or SymForce . System identification, sensor calibration, and automatic differentiation. Experience designing quantitative flight-test experiments for controls and navigation.