Senior Flight & Controls Engineer

PHYSICAL AI / AUTONOMY / REAL-WORLD OPERATIONS

Senior Flight & Controls Engineer

Location: Austin, TX

ABOUT CENTINUS

Centinus builds physical AI and autonomous systems for real-world operations where speed, reliability, and operational effectiveness matter.

Our technology brings AI into the physical world, helping organizations understand complex activity, make faster decisions, and operate intelligent systems in demanding environments. We build for performance beyond the lab - where systems must be dependable, scalable, and ready to support meaningful action in the real world.

We are assembling a small, senior engineering team to solve difficult problems with lasting impact. This is an opportunity to shape the product, the engineering foundation, and the culture of an ambitious early-stage company.

THE ROLE

Centinus is seeking a Senior Flight & Controls Engineer to own the flight behavior and controls capabilities of our autonomous systems.

You will work at the intersection of physical AI, autonomy, controls, vehicle dynamics, and flight systems - turning high-level mission intent into reliable, adaptive vehicle behavior in the real world.

This role goes beyond traditional flight control. You will help define how autonomous systems reason about mission state, transition between operating modes, and fly dynamically in relation to moving objects and changing conditions in the world.

This is a hands-on senior role spanning architecture, implementation, simulation, testing, flight evaluation, and field deployment.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• Design, implement, and tune flight-control and autonomous vehicle capabilities across vehicles, payloads, operating conditions, and mission profiles, including flight dynamics, state estimation, guidance, navigation, and control performance.

• Translate mission intent and evolving world state into adaptive mission and flight behavior - including mode transitions, navigation, maneuvering, mission execution, and dynamic flight relative to moving objects - with high-level reasoning that responds to changing situations.

• Improve robustness to real-world effects such as wind, latency, imperfect sensing, changing vehicle dynamics, degraded conditions, and incomplete information.

• Work closely with AI, perception, autonomy, core systems, and hardware teams to turn world understanding into dependable behavior; build simulation and validation, support flight testing, analyze telemetry and logs, diagnose anomalies, and help define flight architecture and standards for future platforms.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• Strong experience in controls, robotics, autonomous vehicles, aerospace, or flight software, with practical depth in feedback control, vehicle dynamics, estimation, guidance, and navigation.

• Strong C++ and/or embedded or systems software experience, with the ability to reason across software, algorithms, sensors, hardware, vehicle dynamics, and operational behavior.

• Experience taking autonomous or robotic systems from simulation into real-world operation.

• Familiarity with UAV flight stacks and ecosystems such as PX4, ArduPilot, MAVLink, or comparable systems, plus simulation, flight logs, telemetry, system identification, and control tuning.

• Experience building systems that respond dynamically to moving objects, changing conditions, or evolving mission state, with strong troubleshooting skills for complex real-world failures.

• Strong technical judgment and the ability to operate with substantial ownership in a small senior engineering team.

• Highly valued: experience with multi-vehicle autonomy, vision-based navigation, GPS-degraded environments, autonomous mission systems, dynamic target interaction, or high-performance maneuvering.

BUILD WHAT MATTERS. GROW WITH CENTINUS.

At Centinus, flight and controls engineering is where intelligence becomes physical behavior. You will help shape how autonomous systems understand changing situations, choose appropriate mission behaviors, and move effectively through the physical world.

• Own foundational capabilities that determine how autonomous systems behave in the real world, where perception, reasoning, autonomy, and vehicle dynamics come together.

• Help define how future autonomous platforms reason about and interact with dynamic environments, while influencing architecture and technical decisions with long-term impact.

• Work directly with experienced leaders across AI, autonomy, systems, hardware, and product, and grow into broader technical leadership as the organization expands.

• See your work progress from simulation and development into real operational systems.

WHAT WE VALUE

We value exceptional ability, sound judgment, intellectual honesty, diverse perspectives, and people who take ownership of difficult problems.

BENEFITS & EQUITY

• Company equity

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their families

READY TO BUILD WHAT'S NEXT?

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

Centinus is an Equal Opportunity Employer, including individuals with disabilities and protected veterans.