Guidance, Navigation & Control Engineer

About the role

Bliksem Exo is a four-nation European consortium developing an anti-ballistic missile system at operational pace; Destinus is the programme prime and responsible for the exo-atmospheric interceptor. This role owns the flight simulation, navigation, guidance and control algorithms that take the interceptor from flight to terminal engagement, working hands-on with models and analysis to turn performance results into vehicle requirements and engineering decisions.

Key responsibilities

• Build and own the six-degree-of-freedom flight simulation used as the reference model for vehicle performance and analysis.
• Develop navigation and estimation throughout flight, manage the error budget through handover, and develop terminal guidance for the final engagement.
• Own the terminal miss budget, quantifying how sensing noise, timing, disturbances and other uncertainties affect end-to-end accuracy.
• Design and tune control algorithms across flight phases, assessing stability and robustness throughout the operating envelope.
• Run analysis and simulation campaigns across nominal and stressing conditions, turning findings into vehicle and subsystem requirements.
• Integrate GNC performance into the overall interceptor design with the wider engineering team.

Required profile

• BSc, MSc or PhD in Aerospace Engineering, Control Engineering, Applied Mathematics or a related field.
• 10+ years of GNC experience on missiles, interceptors, spacecraft, launch vehicles or comparable high-performance systems.
• Strong expertise in at least two areas across guidance, navigation and estimation, and control, with a solid understanding of the complete GNC loop.
• Experience developing and implementing flight-proven systems for hypersonic and/or space applications, including qualified hardware and software.
• Nice to have: experience taking GNC systems through hardware-in-the-loop testing and/or flight testing.

Required skills

• Strong MATLAB, Simulink and/or Python skills.
• Comfortable owning complex GNC problems from mathematical models through implementation and validation.