Senior Staff Engineer, Flight Control Actuation Systems - Ranger (R6327)

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide.

For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube

What you'll do

System Ownership: Define, allocate, and own the FCAS requirements and verification traceability matrix. Actuator Performance: Design and analyze control surface actuation systems, including sizing, dynamic response, bandwidth, redundancy, and failure modes. Control-Law Integration: Drive the control law-actuator interface with Flight Controls and Vehicle Management Systems, including actuator dynamics modeling and control surface authority requirements.

Power and Thermal Integration: Drive actuator power source architecture and load analysis with EPS and hydraulic systems leads, and resolve actuator heat-generation and local thermal-load interfaces with thermal management. Structural Integration: Drive coordination of control surface hinge moments and actuator reaction loads with structures.

Qualification and Hardware Delivery: Define and execute FCAS qualification test plans per MIL-HDBK-516 and MIL-STD-810, using test results to mature qualified flight-control actuation hardware. Program Execution: Lead FCAS design-maturity and qualification-status reviews at SRR, PDR, and CDR. Required qualifications: Experience: 8 to 15 years in flight control actuation system design on fixed-wing aircraft.