Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) Engineer - Ranger (R6391)

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai https://shield.ai/. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/shield-ai, X https://x.com/shieldaitech, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/shield_ai, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@Shield_AI. You will build and lead the Guidance & Control (G&C) team for Ranger, a fully autonomous aircraft designed for conventional runway takeoff and landing. You will own the team’s technical direction, development roadmap, and project execution, delivering flight control and flight-autonomy capabilities from requirements and architecture through flight verification. What You'll Do - - Build and lead the Ranger G&C team. Define staffing needs, establish clear technical ownership, and develop the team through mentorship, design reviews, and hands-on problem solving. - Own the G&C development roadmap. Translate program objectives into a phased plan for requirements development, algorithm maturation, simulation capabilities, software integration, verification, and flight testing. Establish measurable milestones and align priorities with program leadership and partner teams. - Own project execution and delivery. Scope and estimate work, allocate resources, manage schedules and cross-team dependencies, and track progress against deliverables. Identify technical and schedule risks early, drive mitigation plans, and communicate trade-offs and resource needs. - Define and deliver the G&C architecture, including Auto-Taxi and ATOL algorithms, inner- and outer-loop control laws, guidance, trajectory validation, flight-mode logic, and control allocation. Maintain stable, predictable aircraft performance through actuator constraints, disturbances, uncertainty, and defined degraded conditions. - Lead integration between flight autonomy and mission autonomy through A-GRA-aligned interfaces. Establish clear responsibilities for mission-level decision-making and vehicle-level execution, including command validation, flight-mode transitions, status reporting, and contingency coordination. - Lead development and validation of high-fidelity 6DOF simulation capabilities. Establish model fidelity requirements, validation plans, and uncertainty bounds to support control development, vehicle-level trades, and credible pre-flight performance predictions. - Own the G&C verification strategy and supporting compliance evidence. Define requirements-based acceptance criteria and verification coverage across linear and nonlinear analysis, Monte Carlo campaigns, sensitivity and failure studies, and software- and hardware-in-the-loop testing. - Drive cross-disciplinary trades with propulsion, aerodynamics, actuation, state estimation, embedded software, and autonomy teams. Translate G&C performance needs into subsystem requirements and resolve interface, timing, and integration issues. - Lead G&C preparation and analysis for ground and flight testing, including test-point selection, envelope-expansion planning, pre-flight predictions, and post-flight reconstruction. Provide evidence-based flight-readiness recommendations, resolve simulation-to-test discrepancies, and drive verified corrective changes. What You'll Bring - Required Qualifications - 10+ years of experience in flight controls, GNC, or autonomous aircraft development, with demonstrated technical ownership of flight-vehicle systems from requirements and design through integration and flight test. - Experience building or leading engineering teams, including establishing technical direction, assigning ownership, mentoring engineers, and delivering complex development efforts through coordinated team execution. - Demonstrated ownership of technical roadmaps and project execution, including work scoping, effort estimation, staffing plans, milestone definition, dependency management, and technical risk reduction. - Deep expertise in aircraft flight dynamics, classical and modern control theory, nonlinear systems, and fixed-wing control law design, including stability, performance, and robustness across the operating envelope. - Strong experience developing or validating high-fidelity 6DOF simulations and using ground- and flight-test data to identify modeling limitations, characterize uncertainty, and improve predictive capability. - Experience defining and executing requirements-based verification strategies, including linear and nonlinear analysis, Monte Carlo studies, integrated testing, and flight-test analysis. - Experience integrating guidance, control, and flight-mode logic, with a clear understanding of the division between flight autonomy and mission autonomy and the interfaces needed to support feasible vehicle-level execution. - Proficiency in C++, with experience implementing, reviewing, and debugging G&C or simulation software and addressing real-time execution constraints. Experience using MATLAB and/or Python for engineering analysis and verification. - Strong technical judgment and communication skills, with the ability to resolve ambiguous, cross-disciplinary problems and clearly communicate decisions, assumptions, risks, and limitations to engineers and program leadership. Preferred Qualifications - Experience leading development, integration, or flight verification of autonomous fixed-wing aircraft. - Direct experience defining, implementing, or verifying A-GRA-aligned interfaces, or integrating flight autonomy with a separate mission-autonomy provider. - Experience building a G&C team or development capability for a new aircraft