Flight Dynamics Engineer at Merlin Labs (Boston, MA)Flight Dynamics Engineer

About Merlin: Merlin (NASDAQ: MRLN) is a publicly traded aerospace and defense company building a non-human pilot to deliver full-stack autonomy for any aircraft from takeoff to touchdown. The Merlin Pilot autonomy system powers a growing range of aircraft and mission profiles and has been proven through hundreds of autonomous flights from Merlin's global flight test facilities, including Kerikeri, New Zealand; Quonset Point, Rhode Island; and soon, Bedford, Massachusetts. Headquartered in Boston, Merlin is expanding its organization to accelerate the development and deployment of its autonomy platform, helping customers solve some of aviation's most pressing challenges, from pilot shortages to improving flight safety. Backed by some of the world's leading investors prior to its public listing, Merlin continues to advance the certification and commercialization of autonomous flight across commercial and defense aviation.

About you:

We are seeking a Flight Dynamics Engineer to develop and integrate aircraft models within our simulation environment, supporting scalable and reusable modeling across multiple aircraft platforms.

This role focuses on building and refining aircraft models, contributing to structured modeling approaches, and ensuring models are usable within mission scenarios and simulation workflows. You will work closely with simulation platform and integration teams to bring aircraft models from concept to operational use in our virtual test environment.

This position supports both active aircraft programs and the long-term evolution of our flight dynamics capability.

This role plays a key role in enabling how aircraft behavior is represented and used across our simulation ecosystem. Your work will directly support autonomy development, system integration, and validation efforts across multiple aircraft platforms.

Responsibilities:

• Develop, improve, and update aircraft models that simulate aerodynamics, control systems, servos, brakes, landing gear, etc.
• Support flight test planning, instrumentation requirements, and test data analysis to gather quality data for simulation development and validation.
• Write software to support continuous improvements to our existing simulation.
• Collaborate with virtual test environment users to ensure that their objectives are met.
• Support expansion of our virtual test environment to include additional advancements needed to support our customers

Qualifications:

• BS in Aerospace or Mechanical engineering
• 5+ years of relevant experience working with aircraft dynamics and aircraft simulation
• Proficiency in MATLAB and Simulink with some basic knowledge of C, C++, and python
• An understanding of conventional aircraft simulation modeling techniques
• Experience with flight test
• Experience with aircraft certification

Nice to Have:

• MS/PhD in Aerospace Engineering focusing on aircraft flight dynamics
• Experience integrating with AFSIM
• Experience with Live, Virtual, Constructive simulation techniques and processes
• Proficient in C, C++, and python
• Experience setting up and flying simulators personally or professionally
• Pilot’s license or some flight experience