Flight Guidance & Motion Planning Engineer

The role

You will own motion planning, trajectory generation, and guidance laws. You will work on high-speed autonomous flight by consuming inputs from the estimator and perception pipeline to drive the aircraft.

What you will do

• Plan dynamically feasible paths onboard, including obstacle avoidance, replanning, and perception-aware planning.
• Turn paths into feasible references under airframe and actuator limits.
• Design the laws that steer the aircraft along the reference and hold it there.
• Own the input contracts for the ego-state from Navigation and the perception pipeline.
• Handle latency, rate, and dropout for inputs.
• Manage mode and failsafe logic across cruise, loiter, and approach.
• Verify via simulation, SITL, and HITL, including Monte Carlo campaigns.
• Fly and iterate from logs.
• Support the team by mentoring junior engineers depending on seniority.

Required qualifications

• Degree in aerospace, robotics, GNC, or a related STEM field.
• Proven experience with onboard motion planning, trajectory generation, and tracking.
• Proven experience with guidance laws on flying platforms.
• Hands-on experience closing a control loop on a perception output, handling latency and dropout.
• Familiarity with learning-based planning or guidance and simulation-based training.
• Systems-minded and pragmatic about failure modes and imperfect inputs.
• Disciplined about simulation and validation.
• Communicates clearly, able to present guidance and test results to engineers and senior stakeholders.
• Thrives under pressure in a fast-paced environment with a no-task-is-too-small mentality.
• 100% dedication to Harmattan AI's mission.

Nice to have

• Experience with vision-based or perception-coupled guidance.

About the company

Harmattan AI is a next-generation defense prime building autonomous and scalable defense systems. The company is expanding its teams and capabilities to deliver mission-critical systems to allied forces.