Senior GNC Engineer
Senior GNC Engineer at Icarus — Los Angeles, CA, US
- Company: Icarus
- Location: Los Angeles, CA, US
- Employment type: FULL_TIME
- Salary: USD 120000–220000 / year
- Posted: 2026-07-17
About this 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
Why Icarus
Meaningful equity
Top market salary and bonuses
Health, dental, and vision insurance
Factory in El Segundo
Real ownership, real hardware, real flight
Small team, massive responsibility
High signal (engineering) to noise (management) culture
Dream desk setup
Daily lunch
Unlimited celsius
This is not a normal engineering job
We are pioneers, not corporate managers. Icarus deliberately optimizes for a high signal (engineers) to noise (management) ratio, where engineering, flight, and execution matter more than process, politics, or management overhead
You will work side by side with the CEO and a small team of world-class builders. You will own your subsystem end to end. Design it. Build it. Break it. Fix it. Validate it in the desert. Fly it. Then do it again, faster
We expect full extreme ownership. This is a high-trust, no-BS team, and everyone pulls their weight
We are hiring across the stack: mechanical, aerodynamics, RF, GNC, electrical, avionics, power electronics, energy storage, software, and systems
We want builders. No hand-holding. No fluff. No fake projects. No slide decks. No sitting in meetings all day. Just raw engineering, real hardware, and real flight
You must thrive under pressure, learn fast, troubleshoot in the field, and push hardware to its limits. We move fast. We go to Mojave at 4 am in the morning. We expect results and an obsession with quality and speed
You will be a core executor of flight hardware, taking systems from concept to reality and driving rapid iteration loops. You will work across avionics, power electronics, energy storage, integration, and production bring-up. If you want real ownership, real hardware, and real flight milestones, this is it
No tourists. No bystanders. Only builders.