Senior Guidance, Navigation & Control Engineer for Autonomous UAVs (Hybrid-remote available)

IMPORTANT: WE CANNOT PROVIDE VISA SPONSORSHIP

Preferred starting date: ASAP

Weekly availability: full-time (5 days/week)

Location:

• Aerospace Innovation Hub, Delft, The Netherlands

• Fully remote with regular travel to testing locations (10 days per month)

Fiducial is a young but fast-growing deep-tech start-up with big ambitions at the frontier of autonomy, perception, and defence. We develop and deploy software for on-board UAV autonomy in military applications. Our software solutions are built for scalability first, using low-cost and widely available sensors and compute.

We develop our software in the field and close to the points of use. Flight testing is key for what we do and we test all across Europe. Our team members have strong academic background in different fields such as Aerospace Engineering, Computational Science and Engineering, Robotics and Computer Graphics. Our main office is located in the TU Delft campus in the faculty of Aerospace Engineering.

We work closely with top-tier partners, ranging from drone manufacturers to research institutes. Our projects span from orders in collaboration with operational partners to low-TRL research with government agencies. Whether through formal R&D programs or rapid prototyping tracks, we operate at the intersection of innovation and deployment.

As a Senior Engineer - Controls, you will have broad ownership over core capabilities of our autonomous UAV stack. This includes guidance, navigation and control (GNC) for interception and collision avoidance maneuvers, robust state estimation in noisy sensor environments, and interfacing with a variety of flight controller software systems. You will shape and drive the short-to-medium-term development roadmap. Depending on the project, you may also take on the role of Tech Lead, providing technical direction, coordinating implementation efforts, and ensuring delivery within the scope of a specific project. In our flat organization, this is a project-based responsibility rather than a formal people management or hierarchical leadership role.

• Good understanding of, and experience with, modern C++

• Real-time software development experience such as game, simulation, robotics or embedded development.

• Foundational understanding of fixed-wing and multi-rotor flight dynamics. Both from a theoretical background and from practical experience. You have closed the design → build → fly → design loop, either in a professional or personal context.

• Experience implementing and tuning controllers in actual flight vehicles. You have worked with two out of the three: Betaflight, Ardupilot and PX4.

• Experience with state estimation and sensor fusion concepts.

• Deep intuition for transform trees and pose representations used in game engines, computer graphics, and robotics. You can work confidently with quaternions and common spatial math without relying on a pre-made framework

• Experience with AI coding agents and prompt engineering to accelerate your effectiveness and codebase ownership as a tech lead

• A high degree of autonomy, determination and grit in making cool tech work.

• Big Plus: experience with higher-level autonomy concepts such as path-planning and trajectory optimization

• Full time availability (40 hours)

Yes, these are a lot of requirements. While having the perfect background is nice, if you are able to present evidence of outstanding engineering and execution capability we are interested in talking regardless. If you are the right fit, we believe in your ability to pick up the required background knowledge on the fly.

• Money, of course.

• 25 vacation days per year.

• Reimbursed travel expenses and company laptop.

• (Really) flexible working hours and option to work from home 2 days per week when in the Netherlands. A fully remote position with regular travel to Delft and flight testing locations is also an option.

• Working in an international, world-class team of engineers and entrepreneurs solving real-life problems with amazing technology.

• Large freedom in how you work and implement solutions, project ownership is incredibly important to us.

• The opportunity to take technical risks, to implement stuff the ‘right’ way and to iterate quickly with tight feedback loops. We are innovating, learning is to be expected.

• Responsibility over the things you implement, you are the expert on what you build.

• Traveling abroad to test the solutions you built in relevant environments.

• If after reading the above you are convinced you are the right person for the job, send us some information about yourself; this can be a resume, website or other source, as long as we get a clear impression of your background and skills.

• We’ll get back to you as soon as possible. If we see a potential fit, you’ll first receive a short follow-up questionnaire. Based on your answers, we’ll invite you for a technical interview. This interview is an opportunity to talk through a real problem/scenario and show us you think and communicate.

• If at this point we feel you are the person we are looking for, we’ll discuss the specifics.

• Welcome to the team!