Principal Robotic Controls Engineer

You'll own the controls and estimation architecture for a precision laser beam director—the math and algorithms that keep a laser locked on a maneuvering drone with microradian accuracy. You'll work across perception, optics, and mechanical teams to define the nested coarse and fine pointing loops, the sensor fusion pipeline, and the jitter and latency budgets that determine what the system can hit. Your work goes from theory to simulator to hardware in days, and you'll stand on the range to validate it against real-world targets.

What You'll Do

• Design and own the beam director control architecture: coarse gimbal and fine steering mirror loop structure, bandwidth allocation, multi-rate design, and the handoff between stages.
• Develop target state estimators that fuse radar, EO/IR track, and inertial data into a predicted aimpoint, with latency compensation built in from the start.
• Implement line-of-sight stabilization and jitter rejection through inertial stabilization, accelerometer feedforward, and adaptive filtering for structural modes.
• Establish the pointing error budget across jitter, bias, latency, and atmospheric terms, then achieve and hold microradian precision on the outdoor range against dynamic targets.
• Perform plant modeling and system identification in both frequency and time domains, validate models in hardware-in-the-loop, and feed them into the in-house simulator.
• Conduct robustness and stability analysis with formal margins and sensitivity proofs, not just Bode plots.
• Integrate fire control logic: cue-to-track-to-engage handoff, engagement sequencing, dwell maintenance, and safety interlocks with the laser team.
• Iterate rapidly from simulator to embedded hardware, shipping kHz-rate control loops in C/C++ on real-time targets within days.
• Review controls, estimation, and sensor integration across the system to catch risks others miss.
• Lead by example and mentor engineers through your work, not through management.

What We're Looking For

• PhD-level depth in control theory and estimation: robust control (H-infinity, mu-synthesis, LQG), optimal estimation (Kalman variants, IMM, nonlinear observers), multi-rate and sampled-data design, and adaptive disturbance rejection.
• 10+ years closing loops on precision pointing, tracking, or stabilization hardware in the field, including PhD research on systems that met measured specs.
• Hands-on experience with microradian-class line-of-sight work: beam directors, fine steering mirrors, gimbaled sensors, laser communications terminals, telescope or spacecraft pointing, or equivalent precision mechatronics.
• Proven system identification and plant modeling against real structural dynamics, with a track record of models that predicted hardware behavior.
• Real-time implementation experience: shipped control loops in C or C++ on embedded or RTOS targets, or worked closely with engineers who did, and understand latency and quantization effects on margins.
• Comfort being the technical anchor for controls on a small team rather than managing a large one.
• Background in directed energy or beam control programs at defense primes or government labs, laser communications, EO/IR gimbal houses, telescope or spacecraft pointing, adaptive optics, or a controls PhD group that transitioned research to fielded hardware.

Location

On-site in California. Core hours Monday–Friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., with sprint periods (nights and weekends) before field tests and demos.