About the role
Icarus was founded on the belief that the Stratosphere is the Forgotten Frontier and that reclaiming it will define the next era of aerospace and what is possible from the sky. We build solar-powered aircraft that fly at 60,000 ft for weeks at a time, delivering persistent, affordable, and scalable presence from this layer of the atmosphere.
Mission
Re-establish and maintain dominance in the Stratosphere.
What you’ll do
- Design, implement, and fly guidance, navigation, and control systems for long-endurance stratospheric aircraft
- Own the GNC stack end to end: modeling, simulation, control law design, estimation, tuning, validation, and flight test
- Develop and maintain vehicle dynamics models and simulation environments
- Design and tune controllers for launch, climb, station-keeping, loiter, descent, and recovery
- Integrate GNC tightly with avionics, sensors, propulsion, and autonomy software
- Debug and iterate rapidly using flight data, hardware-in-the-loop, and field testing
- Support integration, production bring-up, and flight operations in the desert
What we’re looking for
- 2+ years working on real GNC systems for aircraft, UAVs, spacecraft, or similarly complex dynamic systems
- Strong fundamentals in dynamics, controls, estimation, and linear systems
- Experience with state estimation (EKF/UKF), sensor fusion, and inertial navigation
- Experience designing and tuning control systems that fly on real vehicles
- Comfortable working from first principles and validating with test and flight data
- Ability to move fast, own outcomes, and troubleshoot in the field
