Lead Spacecraft Perception & Navigation Engineer

Approach Venture; Golden (CO); On-site; USD 160,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity ownership

Comprehensive benefits

Paid parental leave

3 weeks vacation

10+ holidays

Job summary

Approach Venture in Golden, Colorado seeks a Lead Perception & Navigation Engineer to own the spacecraft perception and navigation stack. You will drive relative navigation, state estimation, sensor fusion, and perception systems enabling autonomous proximity operations in a challenging space environment.

You will design real-time estimation algorithms, specify sensor suites, and integrate software into flight hardware while collaborating with controls, avionics, and embedded software teams.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a technical field required.
• 4+ years in perception, navigation, state estimation, sensor fusion, or related algorithm development.
• Strong real-time state estimation and probabilistic filtering knowledge.
• Experience building systems that estimate position, pose, or motion from sensor data.
• C++ and Python development proficiency.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture and development of the spacecraft perception and navigation stack.
• Own relative navigation and state estimation for rendezvous and docking.
• Develop real-time algorithms for relative position, velocity, attitude, pose, and motion estimation.
• Design multi-sensor fusion architectures using EKF, UKF, nonlinear estimation.
• Define sensing requirements (accuracy, update rate, latency, FOV, calibration).
• Integrate algorithms into onboard flight software and embedded computing environments.
• Build simulation environments to evaluate navigation and autonomy performance.
• Validate system performance through software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop testing.

Skills

C++ development

Python development

State estimation

Sensor fusion

Kalman filtering

Autonomy algorithms

Embedded systems

Hardware integration

Software architecture

Real-time systems

Education

Bachelor's degree in a technical field

Tools

ROS

MATLAB/Simulink

Kalman toolchains

Job description

Approach Venture in Golden, Colorado seeks a Lead Perception & Navigation Engineer to own the spacecraft perception and navigation stack. You will drive relative navigation, state estimation, sensor fusion, and perception systems enabling autonomous proximity operations in a challenging space environment.

You will design real-time estimation algorithms, specify sensor suites, and integrate software into flight hardware while collaborating with controls, avionics, and embedded software teams.