Principal Robotic Controls Engineer

About the Role

Own the controls and estimation architecture for a precision laser beam director within a defense technology team. You will take algorithms from modeling and simulation through embedded hardware and field testing, helping deliver accurate tracking against dynamic targets.

What You'll Do

• Design the control architecture for coarse gimbals and fine steering mirrors, including bandwidth allocation, multi-rate design, and stage handoffs.
• Develop estimators that fuse radar, EO/IR, and inertial data into predicted aimpoints, with latency compensation.
• Implement line-of-sight stabilization and jitter rejection using inertial stabilization, accelerometer feedforward, and adaptive filtering.
• Build and manage pointing error budgets across jitter, bias, latency, and atmospheric effects, then validate precision against moving targets in the field.
• Model plants and identify system dynamics in time and frequency domains, validating models through hardware-in-the-loop testing.
• Analyze robustness, stability margins, sensitivity, and performance under disturbances and parameter variation.
• Integrate fire-control handoffs, engagement sequencing, dwell maintenance, and safety interlocks with partner engineering teams.
• Move algorithms from simulation to embedded hardware, supporting kHz-rate control loops and reviewing controls and sensor integration.
• Serve as a technical anchor and mentor through hands-on engineering contributions.

What We're Looking For

• 10 or more years closing loops on precision pointing, tracking, or stabilization systems, including fielded systems with measured performance.
• PhD-level depth in control theory and estimation, or a master's degree with a research-grade record of applying control theory to fielded hardware.
• Strong background in robust control, including H-infinity, mu-synthesis, and LQG, and estimation methods such as Kalman variants, IMM, and nonlinear observers.
• Hands-on experience with microradian-class pointing systems, such as beam directors, fine steering mirrors, gimbaled sensors, laser communication terminals, telescopes, spacecraft, or comparable precision mechatronics.
• Experience with C or C++ control loops on embedded or RTOS platforms, multi-rate and sampled-data design, and real-time hardware-in-the-loop validation.
• Proven system identification and plant modeling experience with real structural dynamics.
• MATLAB/Simulink, C/C++, Python, RTOS, Kalman filtering, or adaptive control experience is relevant.
• Defense or high-energy laser experience, adaptive optics, atmospheric propagation modeling, publications or patents, and ability to obtain a security clearance are additional assets.