State Estimation & Navigation Lead
Neros Technologies15 hours ago
Torrance, CA, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$192k - $268k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own the technical roadmap for onboard state estimation and navigation, including vehicle state, target state, calibrated uncertainty, and the interface with guidance and control.
- Lead and remain hands-on in the architecture, implementation, and field deployment of GPS-denied and GPS-degraded navigation across multiple aircraft.
- Fuse IMU, vision, GNSS, and other onboard sensing on embedded compute, including calibration, synchronization, latency compensation, bias modeling, and outlier rejection.
- Develop visual-inertial and terrain-relative navigation from prototype through fielded capability.
- Define estimation uncertainty, autonomy reliability, accuracy, drift, and consistency measurement standards across the autonomy organization.
- Build and use simulation, dataset replay, hardware-in-the-loop, and flight-test validation workflows.
- Hire, manage, mentor, and review the work of state estimation and navigation engineers.
- Partner with perception, guidance and control, platform software, and hardware teams on sensing, compute, latency, and calibration requirements.
- Debug estimation failures on real hardware and convert them into reproducible regression tests.
- Support flight testing and field deployment of the estimation stack.
Requirements
- 5+ years of professional experience in state estimation, navigation, sensor fusion, or GNC for robotics, aerospace, autonomous vehicles, or defense systems, including experience leading engineers as a manager or technical lead.
- Experience owning a state estimation or navigation system from architecture through deployment on production hardware.
- Deep expertise in estimation theory and practical application, including EKF, UKF, error-state or invariant filters, factor graphs, sliding-window smoothing, and observability analysis.
- Hands-on experience fusing IMU, camera, GNSS, and range or altimetry sensing.
- Experience delivering navigation performance in GPS-denied or GPS-degraded environments.
- Strong C++ and Python skills, including real-time algorithm implementation under embedded compute, memory, and latency constraints.
- Track record of quantitative validation using accuracy, drift, and consistency metrics and simulation, dataset replay, hardware-in-the-loop, and flight-test workflows.
- Experience debugging estimation failures on real hardware in the field and developing reproducible regression tests.
- Strong foundations in linear algebra, probability, and numerical optimization.
- Preferred experience with fielded visual-inertial odometry or terrain-relative navigation.
- Preferred experience with target-state estimation or tracking through clutter and occlusion.
- Preferred experience with PX4, ArduPilot, Betaflight, or custom flight-control systems.
- Preferred experience defining evaluation or performance measurement standards across multiple teams.
- Preferred experience scaling autonomy stacks across multiple vehicle platforms and working in a high-tempo startup or ITAR/EAR-constrained environment.
Benefits
- Highly competitive equity grants are included in the total compensation package.
About Neros Technologies
Neros Technologies designs and manufactures high-performance unmanned systems—air vehicles, autonomy software, and related strike and sensing payloads—for U.S. and allied defense customers. The privately held company, founded in 2023 and headquartered in Los Angeles, focuses on combat-tested drones built and iterated at scale to close the gap between design and deployment. Its work spans GPS-denied navigation, state estimation, guidance, and manufacturing to help rebuild the U.S. drone industrial base.