Staff Engineer, Core Flight Controls

Merlin (NASDAQ: MRLN) is a publicly traded aerospace and defense company building a non-human pilot to deliver full-stack autonomy for any aircraft from takeoff to touchdown. The Merlin Pilot autonomy system powers a growing range of aircraft and mission profiles and has been proven through hundreds of autonomous flights from Merlin's global flight test facilities, including Kerikeri, New Zealand; Smithfield, Rhode Island; and soon, Bedford, Massachusetts. Headquartered in Boston, Merlin is expanding its organization to accelerate the development and deployment of its autonomy platform, helping customers solve some of aviation's most pressing challenges, from pilot shortages to improving flight safety. Backed by some of the world's leading investors prior to its public listing, Merlin continues to advance the certification and commercialization of autonomous flight across commercial and defense aviation.

About You:

• You are an experienced flight controls engineer passionate about autonomous flight who wants to contribute to making airplanes fly themselves.
• You are familiar with fixed wing aircraft and the classical and modern methods used to control them automatically.
• You know how to use industry standard tools for this work, and you are excited to work on novel applications.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement flight controls for our aircraft automation system.
• Decompose system requirements into low level flight controls requirements.
• Help create and use the simulation tools needed for development and testing including.
• Simulink control law modeling, analysis using MATLAB and Python.
• Participate in flight testing for system identification and verification of control law performance on multiple aircraft types.
• Own the flight control system from end-to-end and be responsible for product delivery to programs and customers.
• Collaborate across Merlin to develop novel, certifiable systems to solve the toughest problems in aviation and autonomy.

Qualifications:

• BS in Aerospace/Mechanical/Electrical Engineering.
• 10+ years of experience developing control systems for fixed wing aircraft, with demonstrated understanding of fixed wing aircraft dynamics, classical and modern control design / analysis.
• Experience decomposing systems requirements into high level requirements for both outer loop and inner loop control design.
• Experience working in Model Based Development and certification of flight control systems, including proficiency in MATLAB/Simulink or another model-based development toolset.
• Experience designing, implementing, and testing software for real-time systems.
• Experience with linear model development, linear analysis and frequency domain gain tuning techniques.

Nice to Have:

• MS/PhD in Aerospace Engineering and/or Controls.
• Experience developing never-before-flown control systems.
• Experience extracting linear state space models from flight test data.
• Experience working directly with customers and being a company representative.
• Pilot license.
• Proficiency in C/C++ or Python.

Logistics:

• We welcome remote applicants for this role, with a preference for candidates based in or willing to relocate to Boston, MA for a hybrid work schedule at our HQ.