Senior GNC Engineer

Location: Torrance, California, United States

Department: Autonomy

Who we are

Neros is a defense technology company rebuilding America’s drone industrial base. We design and manufacture high-performance unmanned systems that are tested in combat, iterated at startup speed, and built at massive scale. Our team culture is fast, hands-on, and obsessed with closing the gap between design and deployment.

As drones transform the character of warfare, Neros is delivering the systems the West needs to compete on the modern battlefield and deter the adversaries of democracy. We’re hiring engineers, operators, and builders who want to move fast, take on extreme ownership, and get capability into the hands of warfighters in months, not years.

What you will be doing

The GNC Engineer owns terminal guidance and the associated control path across Neros unmanned aircraft, covering the guidance law, aimpoint command, achievable-acceleration management, and the interface to flight control. This role is accountable for engagement accuracy against maneuvering targets under realistic conditions, including imperfect target state estimates, degraded or lost sensor track, and limited control authority late in the engagement. 

You should have the following

• 5+ years of professional experience developing guidance, navigation, and control software for missiles, interceptors, guided munitions, unmanned aircraft, or comparable autonomous vehicles, with demonstrated ownership of a guidance or control function through flight
• Expert-level knowledge of terminal homing guidance, including proportional and augmented proportional navigation, zero-effort-miss formulations, time-to-go estimation, lead-pursuit geometry, and miss-distance analysis against maneuvering targets
• Demonstrated delivery of guidance or control software onto a physical air vehicle that has flown, not just in simulation
• Production proficiency in C++ and Python, including embedded or real-time development under deterministic execution and latency constraints on resource-limited flight computers
• Working depth in state estimation and sensor fusion, including Kalman and extended Kalman filtering, target motion models, covariance propagation, and observability analysis
• Experience with flight dynamics and control, including autopilot and inner-loop interfaces. Including control authority and actuator saturation limits, achievable-acceleration envelopes, and position or velocity hold control
• Demonstrated use of flight or field test data for closed-loop analysis, including log-based replay, reconstruction of onboard decisions, and root-cause investigation of anomalous engagements
• Fluency with coordinate frame conventions, time synchronization, sensor latency accounting, and uncertainty representation across software interfaces
• Experience participating directly in flight or field test operations, including test planning, instrumentation requirements, range operations, and post-test data review

Nice to have

• Experience with terminal guidance against surface or ground targets, including aimpoint selection on an extended target, impact-angle or impact-point shaping, and engagement geometry planning
• Experience developing safety-critical or high-consequence decision logic, such as engagement authorization, abort criteria, or failsafe behavior, together with the supporting test evidence and written rationale
• Experience with deterministic, reproducible software design for flight-critical components, including bit-exact replay from logged data.
• Background in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or another domain with mature closed-loop evaluation practice, including regression suites, scenario libraries, and release gating on measured performance

US Salary Range

$163,500 – $228,500 USD

The salary range for this role is an estimate based on a wide range of compensation factors, inclusive of base salary only. Actual salary may vary based on (but not limited to) work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Highly competitive equity grants are considered part of Neros' total compensation package.

We’re an equal opportunity employer. We welcome all applicants without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.