What the role involves
About HyLight
- HyLight’s mission is to help society become more resilient to climate change by improving the observation and inspection of infrastructure.
- We build HyLighters, airships that collect data across vast distances with zero emissions.
Our activities include
- Detecting methane leaks from gas infrastructures (4% of global GHG emissions)
- Inspecting power lines to prevent outages and wildfires
- By 2030, we aim to become the global leader in aerial monitoring.
- In just 3 years, we have pushed the realm of possibilities: as we have:
- Developed 8 iterations of the HyLighter
- Logged over 300 flight hours
- Secured our first inspection contracts with Europe’s largest infrastructure operators
- Joined the world’s top startup accelerator, Y Combinator
- Raised €6 millions
HyLight is aiming for a diverse and included team, if your profile doesn't fit all the description but you can bring a diverse point of view, push it forward, it will be highly appreciated.
We’re well-funded and backed by top investors, providing the resources you wish you had when building your own business. We don’t care about traditional roles or titles—just that you’re smart, proactive, and bring the same founder-level ownership and drive to help us build something massive.
Job Summary
This role encompasses all subjects related to the Guidance, Navigation, and Control of our autonomous airship, the HyLighter. GNC is paramount to guaranteeing the perfect execution of our flights. Your mission is to enable HyLight to operate pilotless airships in diverse conditions while proving their robustness to regulatory authorities. This is a high-responsibility position that will involve close collaboration with the entire Technical and Regulatory teams.
A Note from Amine (GNC Lead)
"We have a massive challenge ahead of us: building from scratch the reliable control systems for a completely new type of aircraft, an airship. This role requires a rare balance. You need the analytical, mathematical, and scientific depth to develop complex control laws and implement them in code, alongside a natural intuition for flight dynamics and aerodynamics. At the same time, you must remain incredibly pragmatic, with the ability to be on the ground, testing rapidly, and debugging driver or electronic issues in the field."
The Mission
Under the guidance of our CTO and in collaboration with GNC and Embedded teams, your responsibilities will include:
- Modeling & Control: Understand and model airship dynamics to design and implement control and guidance laws for mission execution.
- Robustness & Safety: Develop flight strategies for difficult conditions and design risk mitigation strategies for degraded modes.
- Hardware Integration: Debug embedded systems and implement flight computers, actuators, and various types of sensors.
- Testing & Documentation: Define and participate in flight tests and simulations, ensuring thorough documentation of implemented models and control laws.
- Future Innovation: Improve the performance of existing airships while actively participating in the design of future flight solutions.
Profile Sought
Education: Master’s degree or equivalent in Aerospace, Mechanical, or Electrical Engineering (a PhD is a plus).
Experience
- At least 5 years of professional experience in GNC within the drone, aerospace, or automotive industries.
- Heritage: You have been part of a GNC or Flight Dynamics team that successfully brought a drone or aerospace product to market.
- The following list of skills is exhaustive, while you may not perfectly fit with the profile, we highly value personal growth and development. We see our interns as potential future team leads at HyLight.
Technical Skills
This is an exhaustive list of sought after skills, if you have
- Systems Mastery: Strong experience in modeling and control with demonstrated mastery of Simulink and theoretical knowledge in dynamics and automation.
- Programming: Excellent skills in Python and C/C++, with experience in MATLAB/Simulink
About HyLight
HyLight builds and operates autonomous airships for long range monitoring. We focus on detecting methane leaks on pipelines and defects on power lines. Our innovation, the HyLighter, is a crossover between drone and airship technology. Like a drone, it is easily controllable and transportable. And, like an airship, it is extremely energy-efficient, enabling it to fly for up to 10 hours at slow speed (22mph) for optimal data collection which represents a range of 220miles. Today, energy infrastructure operators struggle with conducting inspections that are simultaneously: massive and precise. HyLight offers a solution to precisely detect issues on the infrastructure at an industrial scale, and all of this without emitting GHGs. We are 3 co-founders experienced in hardware and energy companies with Masters in Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science and Business from the best Engineering and Business School in France. We have developed 5 different flying aircrafts and signed 5 pilots programs with major energy infrastructure operators. We also have LOIs worth over $3.5M.
Full HyLight profile