Senior Spacecraft Perception Engineer — Docking & Vision

Approach Venture LLC; Golden (CO); On-site; USD 145,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity (stock options)

Medical, dental, and vision coverage

Parental leave

3 weeks paid vacation + 10+ holidays

Job summary

Approach Venture LLC in Golden, Colorado seeks a Senior Perception Engineer to lead the perception and navigation stack for autonomous spacecraft docking. You will own the vision pipeline, sensor fusion, and state estimation across prototypes to flight, coordinating calibration, simulation, and ground testing.

You will implement and verify filters, develop sensor models, and craft flight-ready software in C++ with Python tooling, while collaborating with GNC, flight software, and avionics

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or higher in a technical field.
• Hands-on experience delivering camera-based pose estimation or multi-sensor fusion on space or robotic hardware.
• Proficient in C++ and Python software development.
• Experience deploying algorithms on real-world robotic or space systems with Git.

Responsibilities

• Lead relative navigation for proximity operations and docking end to end (perception, sensor fusion, estimator).
• Bring onboard vision system to flight readiness: target detection, camera calibration, pose estimation, outlier rejection.
• Design and verify relative-state filters (EKF/MEKF/UKF) blending camera data with other sensors.
• Develop first-principles measurement models for all sensors in the navigation suite.
• Set navigation accuracy budgets and translate into sensor/interface requirements (rate, latency, covariance).
• Build calibration rigs and ground-truth tooling for bench and simulation measurement.
• Prove robustness via hardware-in-the-loop testing with statistical checks.
• Write perception/navigation code in C++ and dashboards/tools in Python for flight software.
• Define metrics to track navigation health from development to flight.
• Support flight operations and lead anomaly investigations.

Skills

Camera-based pose estimation

Multi-sensor fusion

C++ & Python development

Git version control

Problem solving in startup

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor's degree in aerospace, electrical, computer science, physics, math

Tools

Git

Job description

Approach Venture LLC in Golden, Colorado seeks a Senior Perception Engineer to lead the perception and navigation stack for autonomous spacecraft docking. You will own the vision pipeline, sensor fusion, and state estimation across prototypes to flight, coordinating calibration, simulation, and ground testing.

You will implement and verify filters, develop sensor models, and craft flight-ready software in C++ with Python tooling, while collaborating with GNC, flight software, and avionics