Senior Autonomy, State Estimation Lead

A fast-growing space robotics company is seeking an experienced Senior Autonomy Engineer, State Estimation Lead to own and advance the state estimation stack for autonomous robotic platforms operating in challenging, unstructured environments.

This role sits at the core of autonomous mobility, supporting navigation, control, safety, and mission operations. You will lead the architecture, development, and validation of state estimation systems that enable reliable autonomy in GPS-denied, high-uncertainty environments such as planetary surfaces.

You will work closely with autonomy, perception, controls, systems, and hardware teams, providing technical leadership on a critical subsystem that underpins vehicle performance and mission success.

What you’ll do

• Own the end-to-end state estimation architecture, including local state propagation, global localization, and external measurement integration

• Design, implement, and validate probabilistic state estimation systems such as extended Kalman filters, factor-graph optimization, and smoothing-based estimators

• Develop and maintain global and relative localization solutions for autonomous vehicles

• Fuse measurements from onboard and external sensors, and infer dynamic constraints from terrain, vehicle health, and operational signals

• Define estimator interfaces, data products, timing requirements, and covariance conventions for downstream systems including planning, control, fault management, and mission operations

• Establish performance requirements, observability analysis, consistency checks, and failure detection strategies

• Lead offline analysis, simulation, and field validation across representative operational scenarios

• Guide sensor fusion strategies in collaboration with sensor and systems engineering teams, including calibration, latency handling, and fault tolerance

• Support anomaly investigation, estimator tuning, and root-cause analysis during integration and field operations

• Conduct field tests and simulations to validate and refine algorithms and software

• Ensure estimation software meets safety, reliability, and performance standards appropriate for space and robotics applications

• Mentor engineers and promote a culture of technical excellence and curiosity

• Stay current with advances in autonomy, robotics, and estimation, and apply them where appropriate

What we’re looking for

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Robotics, Aerospace, Applied Mathematics, or a related field

• 5+ years of professional experience developing state estimation systems for robotics, autonomous vehicles, aerospace, or similar domains

• Strong foundation in estimation theory, uncertainty propagation, observability, and applied filtering

• Hands-on experience with probabilistic estimation techniques such as EKF, UKF, factor graphs, or smoothing methods

• Experience with global localization or map-referenced estimation techniques, including terrain matching or image-based localization

• Proficiency in C++ and Python, with experience using ROS

• Experience providing technical leadership or mentoring engineers on complex algorithmic systems

• Comfortable working in unstructured environments and taking ownership of ambiguous problems

• US Person status

Nice to have

• Experience with GPS-denied navigation or planetary robotics

• Background integrating estimation with control systems, planners, or fault management frameworks

• Experience with terrain-relative navigation or photoclinometry

• Familiarity with simulation and validation tools for estimation performance

• Experience with delayed updates, intermittent absolute measurements, or long-duration autonomy

• Graduate degree in robotics, aerospace, or a related discipline

• Strong cross-disciplinary communication skills
  
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