Guidance, Navigation, & Control Engineer (GNC)

Position Overview

Our seeker and terminal guidance products are moving from demonstrated capability to fielded systems across long-range strike, loitering and guided munitions, counter-UAS, air-launched effects, and rockets and mortars. We need a senior engineer to own the estimation and guidance core of that stack: the tracker, the filters, the fusion, the guidance law, and the navigation solution that keeps working when GPS does not.

What You'll Do

Target Tracking, Estimation & Fusion

• Design and implement multi-target tracking pipelines for static and moving targets: initiation, gating, data association, track maintenance, and re-acquisition after occlusion or dropout
• Develop nonlinear estimators (EKF, UKF, IMM) for target state, relative geometry, and passive ranging solutions
• Integrate multi-modal sensor fusion across EO, IR, and inertial sources; RF where the platform provides it
• Own lock-on-after-launch (LOAL) logic: acquisition, track confirmation, and handoff into terminal guidance

Terminal Guidance & Seeker Algorithms

• Build image-based ATD/ATR chains feeding closed-loop guidance: detection, classification, orientation and rate estimation, and vulnerability aimpoint selection
• Develop and evaluate terminal guidance laws (proportional navigation and variants) against miss distance, seeker field-of-view, and control authority constraints
• Harden endgame performance in real-world conditions: clutter, low contrast, obscuration, and high closing rates

GPS-Denied Navigation

• Create visual-inertial navigation delivering drift-free, absolute positional awareness through midcourse and terminal phases without GPS or laser designators
• Characterize, align, and calibrate INS/IMU systems on low-cost, SWaP-C-constrained inertial hardware
• Implement georegistration, photogrammetry, and map-matching approaches that bound inertial drift; integrate with flight stacks (PX4, ArduPilot)

Real-Time Software

• Write modern, object-oriented C++ implementations of all algorithms, running inside containerized guidance modules on embedded targets (NVIDIA, Qualcomm Snapdragon, FPGA) under hard SWaP-C and timing constraints
• Prototype in Python or MATLAB, then carry it to flight-quality code yourself—there's no throwing it over the wall to a software team here

Simulation, Test & Analysis

• Exercise algorithms in physics-based, photorealistic simulation environments (Unreal, Unity, CSG, AFSIM, FLITES, MODTRAN, DIRSIG)
• Run Monte Carlo and hardware-in-the-loop campaigns to validate performance
• Support captive-carry and live flight test; own the anomaly investigation when telemetry disagrees with the model

Technical Leadership

• Set the algorithm architecture and mentor engineers implementing alongside you
• Engage directly with customers and partners: technical interchanges, live demos, proposals, and SBIR/STTR white papers
• At our size, the engineer who built it is the engineer who presents it