Senior Flight Control Engineer
- Flight Sciences
- Rehovot, Israel
- Full-time
Why this role exists
Most flight control teams optimize for handling qualities and margins, then hand the result to acousticians and hope. At AIRLIFT One the causality runs the other way: how the vehicle moves — its transients, its trajectories through a city — is a dominant term in its acoustic signature. This role exists to put a senior control engineer at the point where those decisions are made, owning control laws in which noise is a hard design constraint alongside stability and performance, not a downstream measurement.
What you'll own
- Design, implement, and tune the vehicle's core control laws in MATLAB/Simulink, with acoustic-source models embedded directly in the design loop.
- Develop control strategies that treat radiated noise as a hard constraint alongside stability margins and handling qualities, through every phase of flight.
- Build and maintain the nonlinear 6-DOF simulation environment used for control design, Monte Carlo robustness analysis, and pre-flight rehearsal of every test point.
- Define attitude, rate, and trajectory constraints for noise-critical flight phases — departure, approach, and low-altitude operations over populated areas — jointly with the Acoustics team.
- Autocode flight-critical control software to the real-time flight computer and verify it through processor-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop campaigns.
- Plan and execute flight test campaigns: write test cards, monitor telemetry in real time, and lead post-flight reconciliation of data against model predictions.
- Run system identification programs that anchor aerodynamic, actuator, and noise-source models in flight data, feeding corrections back into the next control law release.
- Lead control law design reviews with documented stability margins, robustness analyses, and failure-mode behavior, building the evidence base certification authorities will eventually audit.
What you bring
- M.Sc. or Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a closely related field, with a focus on dynamics and control.
- 7+ years designing control laws that flew — on crewed aircraft, UAVs, missiles, or other safety-critical dynamic platforms.
- Deep command of classical and modern control: gain scheduling, robust control (H-infinity, mu-analysis), and nonlinear methods such as dynamic inversion or INDI.
- Expert-level MATLAB/Simulink, including Simulink Coder or equivalent autocoding workflows, plus working Python or modern C++ for tooling and real-time code.
- Hands-on experience carrying control laws through HIL testing into flight test, including telemetry-driven debugging and disciplined envelope expansion.
- Solid grounding in flight dynamics, actuator and sensor modeling, and system identification from flight data.
- Working knowledge of verification practices for flight-critical software in a DO-178C context, and the discipline to design for certifiability from the first commit.
- Clear written English — your design documents, test cards, and analyses become the program's certification record.
Even better if
- Flight control experience on an eVTOL, UAM, or other novel VTOL aircraft program.
- Exposure to ARP4754A/ARP4761 development processes or direct work with EASA/FAA certification teams; familiarity with SC-VTOL is a strong plus.
- Enough aeroacoustics or psychoacoustics background to argue with the Acoustics team in their own language.
- Experience standing up a GNC capability at an early-stage company, where you wrote the first version of everything.
- Publications or patents in control allocation, trajectory optimization, or noise-optimal flight.
Why this matters to quiet flight
Quiet hardware can still fly loud. A control law that bleeds energy into the wrong transient, or a trajectory that aims the vehicle's noise at a schoolyard, erases the advantage our acoustic architecture buys. The engineer in this seat decides, maneuver by maneuver, whether AIRLIFT One sounds like the future of urban flight or like everything cities have already learned to ban.
Life at AIRLIFT One
Small team, total ownership
No layers between you and the aircraft. You own your domain end-to-end — analysis, hardware, test — and your decisions fly.
Aviation breathing culture
Work alongside aviation geeks—engineers, innovators, and builders who are passionate about shaping the future of flight.
Stealth, not isolation
We don't publish yet, but we argue, test, and review relentlessly inside. Intellectual honesty is a daily practice, not a poster.
Built in Rehovot
We work on-site, around the hardware, in one of Israel's deepest engineering talent pools.
Apply
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