Flight Dynamics & Simulation Engineer

Askari is building a new class of autonomous kinetics for the age of robotic warfare. We engineer high-performance capabilities for national security operators in the world’s most demanding environments, purpose-built to kinetically counter unmanned aerial and robotic threats (C-UAS/C-UxS).

We design for real-world constraints, rapid iteration, and immediate deployment, prioritizing fielded capability rather than research demos or shelfware.

Askari moves at a different speed. Our team is composed of engineers who spearheaded programs at organizations including Skydio, Sandia National Laboratories, Hermeus, Area-I/Anduril, Raytheon, GTRI, and Near Earth Autonomy. We work directly with elite end-users to translate battlefield requirements into deployable systems. Backed by top-tier investors and partners across defense and aerospace, Askari is a small, execution-driven team focused on delivering real capability, fast.

• End-to-End Ownership: You own large portions of our autonomous systems from concept through fielding. There is no hand-off; you help design it, build it, fly it, and deploy it.
• National Impact: Our work produces immediate, real-world impact for national security, delivering direct capability to operators in the field.
• Exponential Growth: You’ll stretch across technical domains, take on hard problems, and grow faster than you would in a traditional engineering org.
• Elite Talent Density: You will build alongside a small, highly focused team of top engineers and operators in the industry.

This is a hands‑on, multi‑disciplinary flight dynamics and simulation engineer role where you own the mathematical source of truth for our vehicles. You are responsible for creating the high‑fidelity environment where our system’s behavior is modeled, understood, and perfected. Your mission spans the complete lifecycle of flight dynamics: from the experimental characterization and system identification of critical aerodynamic performance to the deep analysis of telemetry data required to uncover the underlying physics of our platforms.

You will evaluate how our vehicles’ real‑world performance aligns with (or deviates from) classical rotorcraft and rocket theory, capturing these complex non‑linear trends and implementing them directly into our core physics engines. You will exert total control over the design, evolution, and maintenance of a high‑fidelity simulation platform that serves as our primary engineering forge. By perfecting these tools, you will enable us to rapidly iterate on our autonomy stack and fundamentally rewrite the R&D cost structure traditionally associated with developing kinetic defense technologies, replacing expensive, slow‑motion physical testing cycles with high‑velocity, high‑fidelity digital validation.

This role is built for engineers looking to drive a multi‑disciplinary design process, owning the simulation stack from first‑principles 6‑DoF analysis to high‑fidelity SITL/HITL platforms.

• System Identification & Model Validation: Collaborate closely with flight‑test teams to define maneuvers for high‑rate data collection, and lead the development of system‑identification pipelines to derive high‑fidelity dynamic models directly from flight data.
• Simulation Architecture: Architect and maintain the core dynamics simulation library, developing platform‑agnostic, six‑degree‑of‑freedom nonlinear models integrated into both lightweight dynamics‑only simulations and high‑fidelity SITL/HITL environments.
• Advanced Aerodynamic Modeling: Investigate and implement advanced modeling approaches, including neural‑network‑based methods, to capture complex aerodynamic effects and transition behavior in highly nonlinear regimes.

• Dynamics & Kinematics: Deep mastery of rigid‑body dynamics, reference‑frame transformations, and the flight dynamics of complex, aerodynamically unstable aerial vehicles.
• Simulation & Validation:
  
  Experience with Gazebo and bespoke, in‑house simulation platforms
  , including digital‑twin replication and high‑fidelity physics modeling.
• Flight Regimes:
  
  Experience with high‑speed multirotor and…