Controls Engineer, Robotics, Drones and Industrial Hardware (Remote Contract)

OpenTrain AI is seeking experienced control engineers for a remote project involving robotics, drones, automotive systems, and industrial equipment. The role focuses on building and validating plant models, designing and tuning controllers, implementing algorithms in Python, testing them on real systems, and documenting the work to support AI training and evaluation.

Responsibilities:

• Derive plant models from the physics and check them against measured data (state-space or transfer-function form)
• Design, tune and verify controllers, classical PID through to LQR, MPC and Kalman-filter based approaches
• Implement and debug the algorithms in Python, leaning on open-source tooling where it helps (SciPy and python-control, CasADi with do-mpc, or the Julia and Modelica ecosystems)
• Iterate towards something that works reliably on the real system, and write it up clearly
• Work with a remote, cross-disciplinary group

Requirements:

• An engineering degree (controls, electrical, mechanical, mechatronics or aerospace), and over five years since graduating spent designing controllers, including getting them running on physical hardware
• Hands-on PID experience, at least one modern method (LQR / MPC / Kalman), the skill to build and validate plant models both analytically and from data, strong Python, excellent English, and availability of at least 20 hours a week
• Bonus points for production MPC, Modelica, Julia, system identification, embedded C/C++, ROS, nonlinear/robust/adaptive control, publications or open-source work
• Advanced degrees welcome