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Senior Modeling and Simulation Engineer
Astrion
Bedford / Hanscom AFB, MA
- $145,000 to $150,000 USD / year
Astrion has an exciting opportunity for a Senior Modeling and Simulation Engineer located at the Hanscom AFB in Bedford, MA. This role is in the C3I and Infrastructure Division (AFLCMC/HNI)…
Added 10 mins ago
Sr. Manufacturing Engineer
Astrion
Cape Canaveral, FL
…Program Management Support, Mission Integration Management, System Safety & Environmental Engineering, Systems Security & Information Assurance, Launch Schedule and Risk Management,…
Added 11 mins ago
Data Scientist, Journeyman
Sierra Management And Technologies Inc
California, MD
…logistics and program management, cutting-edge software and IT system development, and innovative data science and analytics services to our Department of Defense clients as well as…
Added 16 mins ago
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Fire Protection Engineer (PE)
GPAC
Pittsburgh, PA
- $90,000 to $120,000 USD / year
A well-established, growing engineering firm, is seeking a highly motivated Fire Protection Design Engineer with expertise in fire hazards analysis, and fire protection system design. You…
Added 19 mins ago
Quality Systems Manager
Jobgether
Remote, United States
The Quality Systems Manager will oversee and continuously improve the Quality Management System (QMS) supporting a regulated medical device environment. This role ensures that internal…
Added 23 mins ago
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Lead Principal Platform Software Engineer
Oracle
Nashville, TN
- $113,600 to $306,400 USD / year
We are seeking a Lead Principal Software Engineer to set long-term technical direction for the Robotics Automation Platform. You will lead architecture and technical delivery across…
Added 23 mins ago
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Senior Platform Software Engineer
Oracle
Nashville, TN
- $87,800 to $209,500 USD / year
…configuration, reusable templates, API integration, and Oracle’s Redwood design system to help engineers build consistent cloud management interfaces. Our work spans the browser runtime,…
Added 24 mins ago
Civil Structural Engineer
GPAC
Chicago, IL
We are seeking a Structural Design Engineer to join our growing team. This role offers the opportunity to participate in every phase of structural engineering projects, from preliminary…
Added 24 mins ago
Civil Structural Engineer
GPAC
Dallas, TX
We are seeking a Structural Design Engineer to join our growing team. This role offers the opportunity to participate in every phase of structural engineering projects, from preliminary…
Added 32 mins ago
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Water/Wastewater Engineer
GPAC
New York, NY
- $85,000 to $140,000 USD / year
We are seeking a Water/Wastewater Engineer to join a growing, multi-disciplinary engineering consulting firm. This individual will contribute to the planning, design, and delivery of…
Added 32 mins ago
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Water/Wastewater Engineer
GPAC
Los Angeles, CA
- $85,000 to $140,000 USD / year
We are seeking a Water/Wastewater Engineer to join a growing, multi-disciplinary engineering consulting firm. This individual will contribute to the planning, design, and delivery of…
Added 32 mins ago
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Water/Wastewater Engineer
GPAC
Chicago, IL
- $85,000 to $140,000 USD / year
We are seeking a Water/Wastewater Engineer to join a growing, multi-disciplinary engineering consulting firm. This individual will contribute to the planning, design, and delivery of…
Added 32 mins ago
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Water/Wastewater Engineer
GPAC
Houston, TX
- $85,000 to $140,000 USD / year
We are seeking a Water/Wastewater Engineer to join a growing, multi-disciplinary engineering consulting firm. This individual will contribute to the planning, design, and delivery of…
Added 33 mins ago
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Water/Wastewater Engineer
GPAC
Boston, MA
- $85,000 to $140,000 USD / year
We are seeking a Water/Wastewater Engineer to join a growing, multi-disciplinary engineering consulting firm. This individual will contribute to the planning, design, and delivery of…
Added 33 mins ago
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Water/Wastewater Engineer
GPAC
Minneapolis, MN
- $85,000 to $140,000 USD / year
We are seeking a Water/Wastewater Engineer to join a growing, multi-disciplinary engineering consulting firm. This individual will contribute to the planning, design, and delivery of…
Added 33 mins ago
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Water/Wastewater Engineer
GPAC
Miami, FL
- $85,000 to $140,000 USD / year
We are seeking a Water/Wastewater Engineer to join a growing, multi-disciplinary engineering consulting firm. This individual will contribute to the planning, design, and delivery of…
Added 33 mins ago
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Water/Wastewater Engineer
GPAC
Phoenix, AZ
- $85,000 to $140,000 USD / year
We are seeking a Water/Wastewater Engineer to join a growing, multi-disciplinary engineering consulting firm. This individual will contribute to the planning, design, and delivery of…
Added 33 mins ago
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Water/Wastewater Engineer
GPAC
Denver, CO
- $85,000 to $140,000 USD / year
We are seeking a Water/Wastewater Engineer to join a growing, multi-disciplinary engineering consulting firm. This individual will contribute to the planning, design, and delivery of…
Added 33 mins ago
G
Water/Wastewater Engineer
GPAC
Nashville, TN
- $85,000 to $140,000 USD / year
We are seeking a Water/Wastewater Engineer to join a growing, multi-disciplinary engineering consulting firm. This individual will contribute to the planning, design, and delivery of…
Added 37 mins ago
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Waste Water Engineer
GPAC
Portland, ME
- $80,000 to $100,000 USD / year
We are seeking a Water/Wastewater Engineer to join a growing, multi-disciplinary engineering consulting firm. This individual will contribute to the planning, design, and delivery of…
Added 37 mins ago
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Waste Water Engineer
GPAC
Lewiston, ME
- $80,000 to $100,000 USD / year
We are seeking a Water/Wastewater Engineer to join a growing, multi-disciplinary engineering consulting firm. This individual will contribute to the planning, design, and delivery of…
Added 40 mins ago
Senior Systems Engineer
Philips
San Diego, CA
As a Systems Engineer, you will provide technical leadership for capital equipment development, translating clinical, customer, business, and regulatory needs into system solutions. You…
Added 46 mins ago
MS
Senior Team Lead in Cloud Platform Security and Developer Enablement - VP
MS Services Group, Inc.
NY
- $150,000 to $210,000 USD / year
…shape the future of our communities. This is a Lead Security Engineer position at Vice President…
Added 47 mins ago
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Civil Engineer (Professional Engineer)
GPAC
Fort Myers, FL
- $90,000 to $130,000 USD / year
They are looking to add a Senior Civil Engineer to their growing Engineering team. The Senior Civil Engineer's primary role is to provide engineering design & leadership for private land…
Added 47 mins ago
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Civil Engineer (Professional Engineer)
GPAC
Austin, TX
- $90,000 to $130,000 USD / year
They are looking to add a Senior Civil Engineer to their growing Engineering team. The Civil Engineer's (Professional Engineer) primary role is to provide engineering design & leadership…

Aurelius Systems

Principal Robotic Controls Engineer

San Francisco, CA, United States

$250,000 to $315,000 USD / year

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Job details

Pay: $250,000 to $315,000 USD / year
Posting language: English
Posted: Nov 5, 2026

Original job description

WHO WE ARE

Aurelius Systems is a VC backed defense tech startup building autonomous, edge deployed directed energy systems for counter-UAS. We build laser weapons to shoot down drones.

We're a small team of engineers, former US military operators, and subject matter experts scaling America's directed energy dominance. The first cost effective, reliable and robust laser weapon system.

Our namesake isn't an accident. Marcus Aurelius wrote about doing the work in front of you, every day, without excuses. Henry Ford didn't wait for permission to reinvent manufacturing. That's how we operate: small team, unreasonable output, no hiding behind the unachievable.

In addition to our San Francisco lab, we opened a Detroit manufacturing hub and field test weekly on our own 400-acre private range.

THE ROLE & YOUR IMPACT

We need a Principal Controls Engineer who owns the math behind putting a laser on a drone and keeping it there.

You'll own beam control and tracking as a theory domain across the whole system: the nested coarse and fine pointing architecture, the estimators that fuse radar cues, EO/IR track and inertial data, the jitter and latency budgets, and the analysis that says what the system can and cannot hit before we drive to the range to find out. You'll partner with the perception, optics and mechanical leads on architecture and roadmap, and you'll be the senior technical voice on controls decisions inside the company.

You'll derive the loop, run it in our in-house simulator, and have it on the hardware in days, not weeks. Then you'll stand on our outdoor range, control and refine laser positioning yourself, and watch it hold microradian precision on a maneuvering drone.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

Control architecture for the beam director: coarse gimbal and fine steering mirror loop structure, bandwidth allocation, multi-rate design, and the handoff between stages
Target state estimation: Kalman, IMM and nonlinear filters that fuse radar cue, EO/IR track and inertial data into a predicted aimpoint, with latency compensation designed in, not patched on
Line-of-sight stabilization and jitter rejection: inertial stabilization, accelerometer feedforward, notch and adaptive filtering for structural modes, and the control-structure interaction analysis behind them
The pointing error budget and the field result: jitter, bias, latency and atmospheric terms allocated across the system, then microradian pointing precision achieved and held on our outdoor range against dynamic, real-world targets through hands-on experimentation and deployment
Plant modeling and system identification: frequency-domain and time-domain ID of gimbal, mirror and structure, hardware-in-the-loop validation, and the models our in-house simulators run on
Robustness and stability analysis: margins, sensitivity, worst-case disturbance and parameter variation, with the proof, not just the Bode plot
Fire control integration: cue to track to engage handoff, engagement sequencing, dwell and aimpoint maintenance logic, and safety interlocks with the laser team
Rapid iteration from simulator to hardware: control algorithms out of the sim and onto the system in days, kHz-rate loops on embedded targets with the software team, and the test campaign that shows field data matches the prediction
Technical review and risk: catching what others miss in controls, estimation and sensor integration across the system
Mentorship by example. Engineers learn from watching you work, not from being managed by you

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

PhD-level depth in control theory and estimation. You can derive and defend the architecture, not just tune it: robust control (H-infinity, mu-synthesis, LQG), optimal estimation (Kalman variants, IMM, nonlinear observers), multi-rate and sampled-data design, adaptive and learning-based disturbance rejection
10+ years closing loops on precision pointing, tracking or stabilization hardware, PhD research included, on systems that had to meet a measured spec in the field
Microradian-class line-of-sight work: beam directors, fine steering mirrors, gimbaled EO/IR sensors, laser comm pointing-acquisition-tracking terminals, telescope or spacecraft pointing, or precision mechatronics at equivalent precision
Hands-on system identification and plant modeling against real structural dynamics, and a record of models that predicted what the hardware then did
Real-time implementation chops. You've shipped loops in C or C++ on embedded or RTOS targets, or worked tightly with the engineers who did, and you know what latency and quantization do to your margins
Comfort being the technical anchor for controls on a small team, not the manager of a large one

Where you probably come from: Directed energy or beam control programs at primes and government labs (AFRL, MIT Lincoln Lab, NRL, APL, Sandia), laser communications terminal teams, EO/IR gimbal and stabilized-sensor houses, telescope or spacecraft precision pointing, adaptive optics groups, or a controls PhD group that transitioned its work onto real hardware.

We want to talk if: You've owned the jitter budget on a pointing system, held microradian precision in the field against moving targets, and the data matched your prediction. Your dissertation was in estimation, robust or adaptive control and you've since put that math on hardware that shipped. You can write the proof and the C++ in the same week.

Not a fit if: Your controls experience is PID tuning from a block library without the theory to say why it works. You're a theorist who has never closed a loop on real hardware, or a manager without recent hands-on work.

NICE-TO-HAVES

Directed energy weapon or high energy laser program experience
Adaptive optics: wavefront sensing, deformable mirror control, turbulence modeling (Greenwood frequency, tilt statistics)
Atmospheric propagation and beam wander modeling
MATLAB/Simulink to production code generation, or Python and C++ toolchains for control design and hardware-in-the-loop
Publications or patents in control, estimation or precision pointing
Founder or founding engineer background at a hardware company
Familiarity with MIL-STD standards and ITAR compliance
Active security clearance or ability to obtain one

EDUCATION

PhD in Control Systems, Electrical, Mechanical or Aerospace Engineering, Applied Math, or a related field, with a dissertation in control or estimation theory. An MS plus a research-grade record of theory work put on fielded hardware can substitute.

HOW YOU OPERATE

Extreme bias for action. You'd rather prove the margin and test it this week than model it for a quarter
You characterize your own systems before the field does
Comfortable with ambiguity and fast iteration in a startup environment
You debug from first principles. When the field data disagrees with the model, you find out which one is wrong
Clear communicator across optics, mechanical, software, perception and ML teams, including explaining the math to people who don't have it
Self directed. You identify what needs to happen next and do it without being told

WHY JOIN AURELIUS SYSTEMS

Build more in 1 month than most engineers build in 1 year. We field test weekly. Your work goes downrange, not into a filing cabinet.
Career velocity is real. At ~15 engineers, there are no layers between you and impact.
Work on a problem that actually matters. Small cheap drones are changing warfare. Our laser systems are the asymmetric answer: infinite magazine, near zero cost per shot, scalable to every base, border, facility, and truck.
Join the densest defense startup ecosystem in the country. California is where the next generation of defense companies are being built.

HOW WE WORK

Core hours are Monday through Friday, 9 to 6. When we're sprinting toward a demo or field test, the team ramps up: nights, weekends, whatever it takes to ship. When the sprint lands, we ramp down. We don't manufacture intensity for show.

BENEFITS

Competitive salary and equity
United Health Care medical, dental, and vision coverage
Flexible 18 days PTO plus 5 sick days
Travel to field test events and range days
Covered daily lunches and office snacks and drinks
E-bike and scooter stipend up to $500
Direct access to leadership and real ownership over your work

EXPORT CONTROL NOTICE

This role requires access to export-controlled information or items that require U.S. Person status. As defined by U.S. law, individuals who are any one of the following are considered to be a U.S. Person: (1) U.S. citizens, (2) legal permanent residents (a.k.a. green card holders), and (3) certain protected classes of asylees and refugees, as defined in 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3).

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More about this job

Skills

IMPACT
Estimating
Research
Mechatronics
Direct inward dialing
C
C++
RTOS
APL
Statistics
The MathWorks MATLAB
Python
Hardware industry
Regulatory compliance
Control systems
Aerospace engineering
ML

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