About Vight
Vight is building private use eVTOLs that make point to point flight as normal as driving, starting with rural property owners and flight clubs. We are a small founding team shipping fast in the real world with subscale VTOLs and a clear path to two seat, FAA MOSAIC aircraft and beyond.
Backed by leading investors and operators, our team and advisors include engineering leaders behind world-class hardware at Airbus Vahana, Kittyhawk, SpaceX and Rivian.
We want the hard problems you solve here with other exceptional engineers to be your life's work.
Role
As part of the founding team, you will own the flight control architecture from early subscale prototypes through to our first two seat aircraft.
You will be responsible for the end to end control behavior of the vehicle, from control algorithms to the feel of the stick in hover, transition and cruise. You will balance rapid subscale iteration with the discipline needed to architect a safety critical software stack for the full scale MOSAIC vehicle.
We are currently down-selecting our configuration through conceptual design and initial subscale flight testing. You will help shape these critical architecture decisions through PDR and beyond.
What You Will Do
- Architect and own the vehicle simulation framework, including a 6 DoF we will iterate on quickly, without leaning on expensive and proprietary tools.
- Develop flight control architecture for hover through cruise, including flight envelope protection, stability shaping, failure response logic and high level safety functions.
- Own transition envelope analysis. Control authority can disappear mid-transition even if hover and cruise are fine. Size actuators and power systems for worst-case transient loads, not nominal.
- Coordinate with structures on dynamics, avionics on sensor performance, and propulsion on control allocation and avoiding actuator, torque, and control-surface saturation.
- Debug issues in the field: sensor noise, magnetic interference, actuator anomalies and close the loop fast for rapid iteration.
You Might Be A Fit If You
- Have done exceptionally hard things on aircraft programs at high velocity: first flights, DARPA programs, or early-stage startups where you had significant ownership of controls.
- Have transition vehicle experience such as tailsitter, tilt-wing, or tilt-rotor aircraft, or demonstrate ability to reason clearly about the GNC challenges with these aircraft designs.
- Are hands-on and excited to own architecture, iterate quickly, and learn from flight data.
- Have personally designed flight control laws, stood up sims, and been in the control room during flight test.
- Are skilled in controller design, system ID from flight data, and real-time filters or estimators like EKF.
- Have experience iterating on custom control architectures and integrating feedforward terms or similar techniques.
Nice To Have
- Pilot certificate: commercial, instrument, or private. You do not need a pilot cert to write control laws, but someone who flies their own airplane has deep intuition about how aircraft should feel and behave.
- Experience with custom or proprietary flight stacks or heavily modifying ArduPilot/PX4.
- Builds own aircraft, contributes to open-source autopilot projects, or competes in RC/UAV competitions.
- Public builder artifacts such as technical blogs, GitHub, conference talks, YouTube breakdowns, or published sim/tooling work.
- Familiarity with aviation certification standards such as DO-178C, DO-254, MOSAIC, or ASTM F3201.
- Demonstrated exceptional ability to learn new tools, domains, or technical skills quickly.
- Experience in a fast-moving hardware environment like DBF, a university UAV lab, or a hardware startup.
What We Offer
- You will own the control architecture for subscale prototypes and the early full scale architecture, with the opportunity to own more of the autonomy and vehicle intelligence systems as the team grows.
- Hands-on, fast-cycle hardware development: subscale VTOLs in the air and no management overhead.
- The opportunity to do career-defining work on the ground floor of a generational change to personal aviation and mobility, helping shape the culture in the process.
- Medical and dental included.