Lead Rover Navigation and Perception Engineer

• Lead a small team of engineers to design, characterize, test, verify, and validate localization and perception systems for extra-terrestrial rovers
• Bring a navigation and perception solution from early design through flight operations on an aggressive schedule for Astrolab’s CLV-1 lunar rover
• Work closely with the software team to implement and test navigation, perception, and obstacle avoidance flight software
• Ensure that extra-terrestrial rover navigation and perception solutions are robust, upgradable during flight, and practical
• Devise, supervise, and execute navigation and perception system testing with real sensors and flight computers using a test vehicle operating in simulated lunar conditions
• Ensure that navigation and perception system meet performance and NASA human rated spacecraft system requirements

What you'll bring:

• Bachelor's degree in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics) field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience
• 10+ years designing, developing, and testing navigation, localization, and perception systems for rovers, autonomous vehicles, GPS-denied vehicle navigation systems, or similar autonomous or robotic platforms.
• Experience with practical sensor fusion and Kalman filtering for wheeled vehicle navigation and perception, with specific experience using sensors with widely different modalities to determine robust navigation and perception solutions (e.g. IMU, lidar, radar, star tracker, etc.)
• Experience designing, tuning, developing, analyzing, characterizing, verifying, and validating navigation and perception solutions for wheeled vehicles
• Experience developing, testing, and characterizing obstacle detection and avoidance algorithms for wheeled vehicles
• Experience dealing with real world issues that affect navigation/localization/perception system design and performance, such as invalid data, dropped packets, data latencies, blurry images, and similar
• Experience supporting a navigation/localization system through the entire lifecycle, from early design through live vehicle operations
• Experience in C++ and Python programming