Senior Space Perception Engineer - Autonomous Docking

MaC VC; Golden (CO); On-site; USD 145,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, vision, and dental coverage

Disability and life insurance

Paid parental leave

3 weeks vacation + 10+ holidays

Job summary

Rendezvous Robotics is seeking a Senior Perception Engineer in Golden, CO to lead the tile's relative navigation stack, from perception and sensor fusion to onboard flight software. You will define sensor interfaces, build calibration, simulation, and test infrastructure, and verify algorithms on ground and in orbit.

You will work with a small team of GNC, flight software, and avionics engineers to ensure robust docking and autonomous operation of self-assembling satellites.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in aerospace/electrical engineering, physics, mathematics, computer science, or other relevant engineering discipline.
• Software development experience in C++ and Python.
• Hands-on experience delivering camera-based pose estimation or multi-sensor fusion on a real robotic or space system.

Responsibilities

• Own relative navigation for proximity operations and docking end to end: perception, sensor fusion, and the estimator that feeds the control loop
• Take the tile vision system to flight: detection, calibration, pose estimation, outlier rejection, and robust performance across range, environment, and relative motion
• Design, implement, tune, and verify the relative-state estimator (EKF, MEKF, UKF, etc) that fuses vision with the other relative sensors, including the handoff between sensors as range closes
• Derive measurement models from first principles for each sensor in the relative-navigation suite
• Define and own the navigation accuracy budget as a function of range and the sensor-suite and interface requirements (rate, latency, covariance, dropout) that meet it
• Build the calibration and ground-truth infrastructure that lets perception performance be measured on the bench and carried into simulation
• Verify performance and robustness with hardware-in-the-loop experiments, using statistical consistency tests
• Implement perception and navigation algorithms in onboard flight software in C++ and develop the supporting simulations, tools, and dashboards in Python
• Support flight operations, monitor on-orbit navigation health, and lead on-orbit anomaly investigations

Skills

C++

Python

Vision-based pose estimation

Sensor fusion

Flight software

GNC

Ground testing

Education

Bachelor's degree in aerospace/electrical engineering, physics, mathematics, computer science, or other relevant engineering discipline

Tools

Camera calibration

Kalman filtering

Embedded compute

Git

Job description

Rendezvous Robotics is seeking a Senior Perception Engineer in Golden, CO to lead the tile's relative navigation stack, from perception and sensor fusion to onboard flight software. You will define sensor interfaces, build calibration, simulation, and test infrastructure, and verify algorithms on ground and in orbit.

You will work with a small team of GNC, flight software, and avionics engineers to ensure robust docking and autonomous operation of self-assembling satellites.