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San Francisco, California, United States
Onsite
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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).