An early-stage space company building autonomous spacecraft that can operate safely in close proximity to other objects in orbit. This role sits at the center of that effort, owning the guidance, navigation, and control stack that enables precise relative motion, robust estimation, and flight-ready proximity operations.
Competitive Salary, Meaningful Equity, Full-packa
Role Description
As a Proximity Operations GNC Engineer, you will own the guidance, navigation, and control stack that enables autonomous spacecraft to operate safely in close proximity to other objects on orbit. You will sit at the center of the autonomy effort, driving precise relative motion, robust estimation, and flight-ready proximity operations.
This role is hands-on and execution-focused. You should be comfortable operating with ambiguity, building high-fidelity simulation and analysis environments, and making defensible architecture tradeoffs that hold up in integrated testing and mission ops.
Core Responsibilities
- Lead the technical direction for proximity-ops autonomy, shaping how guidance, estimation, and control come together in a flight system.
- Develop and compare approaches for relative navigation and maneuver planning, including probabilistic filtering, model-based methods, and learning-informed techniques where appropriate.
- Drive key architecture decisions across relative estimation, guidance logic, control, and autonomy safety constraints.
- Create and maintain high-fidelity simulation and analysis environments for relative and orbital dynamics, sensor and actuator behavior, uncertainty, and closed-loop performance.
- Define validation strategy, including datasets, scenarios, performance metrics, and test plans that prove readiness beyond “it works in sim.”
- Partner with flight software to productize algorithms, including interfaces, timing, and fault cases, and own integrated testing.
- Lead integrated testing efforts including hardware-in-the-loop, end-to-end rehearsals, and closed-loop debugging with real sensors and actuators.
- Contribute to mission execution by defining operational playbooks and CONOPS that account for real spacecraft constraints, and support critical test and ops milestones.
Skills and Experience
- 5+ years delivering GNC or autonomy for real systems, space preferred, with adjacent aerospace or robotics acceptable with strong dynamics and estimation credentials.
- Demonstrated expertise in at least one of state estimation, guidance and trajectory design, or controls, plus the ability to integrate across the full stack.
- Strong implementation skills in Python. Experience with C or C++ and real-time or embedded development is beneficial.
- Experience taking work from early concept through verification and deployment, including debugging with real sensors and actuators and closing the loop in integrated tests.
- Familiarity with orbital mechanics and multi-body or perturbed dynamics is a plus.
- Comfort with Linux and version-controlled workflows.
- High ownership, clear communication, and the ability to operate independently in a fast-moving environment.
Why Join
You will own the GNC stack that makes proximity operations real, taking relative navigation, maneuver planning, and control from concept through integrated test and mission execution. You will set the validation standard beyond “it works in sim,” and ship flight-ready autonomy on an early platform where technical decisions have direct mission impact.
ITAR Compliance
This position requires compliance with U.S. Government export regulations. Candidates must be a U.S. citizen, U.S. permanent resident, or a protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3).
