Control and Automation Engineer, PAT Systems

Join an innovative technology company as a Control and Automation Engineer, specializing in advanced optical communication and photonics-based systems. You will be responsible for the development of Pointing, Acquisition and Tracking (PAT) systems for Free-Space Optical (FSO) communication products.

Education: Master’s degree or Engineering degree in Automation, Mechatronics, Robotics, Electrical Engineering or a related discipline. Equivalent practical experience may also be considered.

Responsibilities

• Your role will involve control law design, precision servo control, system modeling and simulation, kinematics and geometry, acquisition strategy, pointing error budgets, real-time embedded implementation, bench testing and correlation, and system integration.
• A master's degree in a related field and experience in closed-loop control systems are required.
• Contribuer au développement de systèmes de pointage, d'acquisition et de suivi (PAT) pour des produits de communication optique avancés.
• Posséder la couche de contrôle de la chaîne PAT, de la modélisation du système à la mise en œuvre en temps réel, aux tests de banc et à la corrélation des performances.
• Développer et mettre en œuvre des lois de contrôle pour les boucles de pointage fines et grossières, en appliquant des techniques de mise en forme de boucle et d'état.
• Experience modelling dynamic systems, including actuators, structures, sensors, delays, noise and non-linearities.

Requirements

• Professional Background: You have designed, implemented and measured at least one closed-loop control system on real hardwarecsuch as a precision stage, robotic system, stabilised payload, drone, optical bench or motion-control system.
• Strong proficiency in MATLAB/Simulink or an equivalent control design and simulation environment.
• Solid command of classical and modern control techniques, including loop shaping, state-space control, stability-margin analysis, filtering, feed-forward control and disturbance rejection.
• Ability to perform or support system identification and to correlate dynamic models with experimental measurements.
• Practical understanding of precision actuator behaviour, including friction, stick-slip, hysteresis, dead bands, saturation and non-linear drive effects.
• Knowledge of forward and inverse kinematics, calibration procedures and coordinate/reference-frame transformations
• Experience with estimation and filtering techniques, such as Kalman filtering or observer-based approaches, is appreciated.
• Proficiency in embedded C and the ability to deploy control functions on microcontroller, SoC or similar processing targets.
• Understanding of real-time software constraints, including deterministic execution, sampling, latency, timing and timestamping. Experience with RTOS environments is a plus.
• Test & Measurement Skills: Comfortable working hands-on in the laboratory, including measuring frequency responses, vibration spectra, jitter and closed-loop performance. You understand that a control model must be challenged and validated by measured data.
• Additional Skills: Experience with camera or detector in the loop sensing, centroiding, vibration measurement, spectral analysis, FPGA/SoC data paths or pointing error budget methodologies would be a strong advantage.
• Mindset: You combine strong theoretical foundations in control with a practical engineering mindset. You enjoy closing the loop on real hardware, diagnosing unexpected dynamic behaviour and turning experimental results into robust, deployable control solutions.
• English: Professional working proficiency in English, with the ability to write technical documentation and communicate effectively with international suppliers, partners and engineering teams.

Preferred

• Technical Expertise:
• Relevant Industry Experience: Experience in optical pointing, adaptive optics, spacecraft attitude control, stabilised optronics, robotics, precision motion control, drones or high-performance mechatronic systems would be highly valued.

Pay

EUR 40,000 - 60,000