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Navigation Lead Engineer for Human Landing Systems (SME)

Amentum
Huntsville, United Statesfull_timeVerifiedPosted 29 Jun 2026

About the role

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The Sr Aerospace Navigation Lead Engineer stewards a team of navigation engineers across NASA centers that perform independent navigation analysis and simulation for the Human Lander System (HLS) program to asses and communicate risk to the HLS Chief Engineer and HLS commercial partners. This position will require demonstrated strong leadership and communications skills as well as strong technical background, including deep space navigation, orbit determination, on-board navigation sensor modelling, accelerometers, gyros, IMUs, radar, lidar, sensor fusion, and Kalman filtering techniques. Navigation lead will direct work of navigation team that performs high fidelity analysis of the HLS navigation architecture to assess mission risk.

Description

The Amentum Space Exploration Division (ASED) Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GN&C) team is a high performing group executing challenging tasks to design and integrate GN&C systems for NASA projects ranging from NASA’s Space Launch System(SLS) to NASA’s Human Lander System. We are searching for highly qualified candidates to support NASA’s Flight Dynamics Team in the Guidance, Navigation, & Mission Analysis branch at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. This exciting work will serve as a critical step in sending humans back to the Moon, Mars and beyond!

ASED offers a partnership in which you can grow personally and professionally within a framework of strong leadership, competitive compensation, and rewarding career paths. Come join our team!

Job Functions:

  • Lead the insight/oversight effort of the HLS GNC group (across NASA centers) with regards to all aspects of the navigation system
  • Leading efforts for the Modeling and simulation of landing performance analysis of HLS trajectories
  • Leading efforts for the integration of all relevant models into the simulation, including on-orbit estate estimation using ground tracking (e.g. range and doppler form Deep Space Network stations), on-board state estimation fusing inertial measurements with terrain relative sensing such as optical, radar, lidar measurements
  • Stewards trade studies to assess navigation performance under dispersed model parameters to assess uncertainty of unknown model parameters, and evaluates navigation margins
  • Assesses HLS commercial partner test data and partner sensors and models
  • Develops in-house models and/or integrates sensor models from HLS commercial providers into 6-DOF simulations such as the GeneraLized Aerospace Simulation in Simulink (GLASS) tool
  • Performs and stewards deep space navigation studies to assess HLS partner’s navigation performance using FreeFlyer, MONTE or JSC-Linear Covariance Tool (SIGMA)
  • Execute/modify existing software/scripts in Python, Matlab, Fortran, C++
  • Communicates naviation margin findings to HLS Chief Engineer and HLS commercial partners
  • Maintains and strengthens NASA HLS cross-center navigation team
  • Develops and coordinates with the GNC discipline strategic planning for growing navigation expertise at MSFC

Provide demonstrated (minimum of 10 years) expertise to support the Human Landing Systems (HLS) program navigation team at the level of a Subject Matter Expert, as part of the Guidance Navigation and Control (GNC) discipline. Specifically, this task will entail technical leadership of a team of navigation engineers achieve safe Moon landing and return to Earth. Programming skills and mentoring abilities are highly desired.

Qualification

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Company

Amentum

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