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Regulus Cyber is a defense-tech startup developing counter-drone and uncrewed defense systems. DART is an autonomous counter-drone system featuring a radar-cued ground station that launches small interceptor drones equipped with thermal seekers to detect and neutralize hostile threats. The interceptor platform uses COTS high-agility racer hardware with Betaflight for inner-loop control and a mission computer for perception and outer-loop guidance.
You will own two critical disciplines: guidance and control law design, and the simulation environment used to develop, validate, and regression-test those laws before flight testing. This is a hands-on leadership role where you are expected to write and tune code, analyze flight logs, participate in field testing, and set technical direction for a small team.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning outer-loop guidance systems (image-based thermal aim, pursuit/proportional-navigation, latency-compensated line-of-sight, throttle management)
- Managing end-to-end latency and stability budgets
- Implementing and tuning controllers (PID/PI to adaptive/MPC)
- Defining flight controller interfaces (MSP/CRSF/SBUS injection)
- Governing flight-mode state machine, failsafes, and safety envelope
- Delivering a 6-DOF simulation product (interceptor/target dynamics, thermal seeker)
- Maintaining SIL/HIL rigs for unmodified production code
- Validating models against flight data and running automated regression suites
- Leading and mentoring the control and simulation team
- Setting test-progression gates from simulation to full-envelope flight
- Collaborating with Vision and Systems Engineering teams
- Producing all required technical artifacts
REQUIREMENTS:
- B.Sc. in Aerospace, Electrical, Mechanical Engineering, or Applied Math/Physics
- 5+ years designing and flight-proving guidance, navigation, or control systems on real hardware (not simulation-only)
- 2+ years leading engineers, formally or as a technical lead
- Strong practical control theory: state-space and classical design, stability margins, discrete-time implementation, cascaded loop architecture, and failure mode analysis
- Demonstrated experience with state estimation (Kalman/EKF) and sensor fusion
- Strong Python; C/C++ for real-time or embedded targets
- Hands-on experience building or heavily extending physics-based simulation (PyBullet, Gazebo, MuJoCo, Simulink, or in-house) and validating against measured data
- Multirotor experience: flight dynamics, PX4/ArduPilot/Betaflight, tuning, and flight log analysis
- Comfort owning safety-critical decisions on fast, dangerous airframes and disciplined risk assessment
