Senior Autonomy Engineer - State Estimation

Are you passionate about shaping the future of humanity's presence in space? Lunar Outpost, a trailblazer in space robotics, invites you to join our team! Lunar Outpost is dedicated to creating a sustainable presence in space, while also driving positive impacts here on Earth. We are seeking a talented, experienced Senior Autonomy Engineer - State Estimation. As a part of our State Estimation Team, you will play a pivotal role in developing cutting-edge autonomous navigation and control systems for our lunar rovers. Working at the intersection of autonomy, robotics, and space exploration, you will be responsible for the architecture, development, and verification of the vehicle state estimation stack, including local state filters, global localization methods, and lunar surface state measurement solutions. This role provides technical leadership for a critical subsystem that underpins mobility, autonomy, safety, and mission operations. Collaborating with cross-disciplinary engineering teams, you'll bring your expertise to solve complex challenges and drive the innovation needed to explore new frontiers in space. 

Take the #NextLeap with Lunar Outpost and work on the Pegasus LTV, which will carry NASA astronauts farther than they've ever been before on the lunar surface! 

Key Responsibilities: 

• Own the end-to-end state estimation architecture for robotic platforms, spanning local state propagation, global localization, outlier rejection, and external measurement integration 

• Lead the design, implementation, and validation of state filters, including extended Kalman filters, factor-graph optimization, and related probabilistic estimators 

• Develop and maintain both global and relative localization solutions

• Fuse state measurements from onboard and external sources and infer dynamic constraints on state from sources such as terrain features, vehicle health signals

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

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

• Lead offline analysis and field validation of estimation performance 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 refile algorithms and software systems

• Ensure software systems adhere to industry standards for safety, reliability, and performance in space exploration contexts

• Mentor junior engineers and promote a culture of technical excellence and innovation within the team 

• Stay at the forefront of autonomy and robotics technology, incorporating the latest advancements into our projects

Required Qualifications: 

• Experience in research and development of perception and localization in unstructured environments 

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in