Model Based Design Engineer (Wind & Sea)

About the Role

We are developing autonomous fixed-wing aircraft that operate over the ocean and use wind gradients, weather, and sea conditions to plan safer and more energy-efficient trajectories.
We are looking for an engineer or scientist with a strong understanding of atmospheric physics, wind modeling, oceanography, sea state, and environmental modeling who can help us build a model of the environment around the aircraft.

The goal is to combine aircraft measurements, ocean measurements, and weather data to understand and predict the wind, waves, and ocean conditions the aircraft will encounter and use this information for trajectory planning and Dynamic Soaring.

This is a hands-on role involving physics-based modeling, simulation, sensor-data analysis, environmental prediction, and integration with aircraft trajectory planning.

What you’ll do

Working closely with our GNC, Embedded, Avionics and flight test teams you will:

• Environmental Modeling: Build models that describe the wind, atmosphere, sea state, and ocean conditions around the aircraft.

• Wind Prediction: Estimate how wind speed, direction, and wind gradients change with altitude, position, and time.

• Sea-State Modeling: Estimate waves, swell, sea-surface motion, and ocean currents relevant to low-altitude flight.

• Model Updating: Combine aircraft, buoy, and external weather measurements to continuously improve the environmental model.

Skills and Competencies

We are particularly interested in experience with:

Atmosphere & Wind: Wind profiles, wind gradients, wind shear, atmospheric boundary layers, surface roughness, gusts, turbulence, atmospheric stability, temperature, pressure, humidity, and air density.

Model-Based Systems: Experience building mathematical or simulation models of real physical systems and using measurements to continuously estimate, predict, and improve those models.

Estimation & Data: Sensor fusion, Kalman filtering, EKF/UKF, environmental state estimation, and combining aircraft, buoy, weather, satellite, and ocean data.

Tools: Python, MATLAB/Simulink, C++, or similar scientific modeling and simulation tools.

Nice to haves

Strong practical or research experience in atmospheric modeling, ocean modeling, numerical simulation, environmental fluid dynamics, weather prediction, offshore wind, or similar fields.

Experience with marine atmospheric boundary layers, offshore environments, UAV atmospheric measurements, wind-energy systems, oceanographic sensing, or autonomous vehicles is highly desirable.