Flight Controls Engineer

About Ardent

We are building the flying car. The next generation of great companies will deliver on the sci-fi promises of the mid-20th century, and personal aviation remains conspicuously unfinished. Aviation went from twelve seconds over the dunes at Kitty Hawk to supersonic flight in a single man's lifetime. Then progress in personal aviation ground to a halt. Ardent is reconsidering the aircraft from first principles: distributed electric propulsion designed to accommodate inevitable failures, hydrocarbon energy for useful range, and relentless simplicity to make the product affordable. Electricity should move the aircraft. Fuel should carry the energy.

Our path begins with the simplest aircraft capable of proving that architecture, progresses through unmanned applications, and leads to a two-seat aircraft that people buy because they want to go somewhere. Each step must compound toward the same goal: a flying car that clearly wins against the car on meaningful trips. We will build, fly, break things, and let reality and rapidly developed test data be the final arbiter. The measure of success is miles flown that otherwise would have been driven—and, eventually, journeys that used to be impractical. The automobile radically expanded the geographic and economic radius of human life. Personal aviation will do it again.

About the role

Develop, implement, and test the controls that make Ardent's aircraft fly. You will work closely with the Flight Controls Architect and the people building the aircraft, taking algorithms from models into real hardware. This is an individual contributor role with meaningful ownership of specific controls, estimation, simulation, or verification work. You should want to see your code run on a test stand, understand what the data says, and improve the aircraft with every test.

What you will do

• Develop and validate flight dynamics models, control laws, state estimators, and control-allocation algorithms within the system architecture.
• Implement algorithms in the flight software environment with attention to timing, numerical behavior, sensor quality, actuator limits, and clear interfaces.
• Build and maintain simulation and analysis tools. Compare predictions with ground and flight data, and improve models where they disagree.
• Create repeatable software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop tests for normal operation, envelope limits, and failures.
• Exercise motor-loss cases, sensor faults, communication delays, saturation, and degraded power conditions. Document the results and surface unexpected behavior early.
• Support sensor calibration, hardware integration, ground testing, and flight testing. Turn logs into specific findings and verified fixes.
• Participate in code and design reviews, maintain traceable test results, and keep the tested software and aircraft configuration aligned.

What you bring

• Strong fundamentals in dynamics, feedback control, estimation, and applied mathematics, demonstrated through systems you have built or tested.
• Ability to write reliable software for numerical analysis and embedded implementation. Experience with Python, MATLAB or Simulink, and C or C++ is useful.
• Experience using simulation and experimental data to evaluate a control system, including stability, transient response, and robustness.
• Comfort working with sensors, actuators, flight logs, and hardware that introduces noise, delays, and constraints.
• Clear technical communication, careful testing habits, and willingness to work directly with the aircraft and integration team.

Useful experience

Experience with multirotors or other VTOL aircraft, PX4 or another flight stack, real-time embedded development, hardware-in-the-loop systems, system identification, or fault-tolerant control. Strong flight-tested project work counts.

What success looks like

Your algorithms work on the aircraft, your tests catch problems before flight, and your analysis helps the team understand what happened. You can take a defined controls problem from implementation through measured verification.