GNC Engineer

About the role

Today, everything we send to space is constrained by what fits inside a rocket fairing. That's a fundamental bottleneck to building more capable spacecraft. Rendezvous Robotics is solving this problem with electromagnetic self-assembling tiles: modular spacecraft components that rendezvous, dock, and latch to assemble bigger and more powerful spacecraft than anything that can be folded to fit into a rocket.

We're a small team based in Golden, Colorado, executing on a clear path from flight demonstration to our first operational systems. Our work spans hardware, software, and systems engineering. We are looking for the best people in the world who want to build the next generation of advanced spacecraft.

GNC Engineer

As a GNC Engineer, you will own guidance, navigation, and control across the full lifecycle of our spacecraft: from the individual tiles that rendezvous, dock, and latch, to the large reconfigurable vehicle they assemble into. You will define how tiles find each other and close the final meters, how a vehicle whose mass properties change with every docking de-tumbles, points, slews, and manages distributed momentum, and how all of it is estimated on board from a small suite of sensors. You will develop algorithms through analysis and simulation, implement them in the flight software stack, verify them on hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) testbeds, and fly them in space, optimizing performance every step of the way. This is an opportunity to apply expertise in dynamics, estimation, controls, orbital mechanics, and simulation to architect the GNC system, drive sensor and actuator requirements and selection, and operate spacecraft on orbit. You will collaborate with a small multi-disciplinary team across software, avionics, structures, test, and manufacturing to represent the vehicle at the system level, ultimately defining the scope and requirements for future vehicles.

Responsibilities

- Develop highly reliable, performant GNC algorithms, simulations, tools, and dashboards in C++ and Python

- Own the vehicle-level guidance, navigation, and control architecture and its concept of operations: design, implement, tune, and verify

- Develop and maintain the 6DOF simulation environment, including validated dynamics, actuator, sensor, and environment models, and use it to drive Monte Carlo verification of GNC performance and robustness

- Design guidance for rendezvous, proximity operations, and docking of individual tiles, including approach trajectories, capture-rate management, and abort and safe-mode logic

- Design navigation and state estimation for relative and absolute states, fusing rate sensors, ToF and vision sensors, magnetometers, GNSS, and other sensors, along with the associated calibration and fault detection

- Design attitude control and momentum management for the assembled spacecraft: de-tumble, pointing, slews, and desaturation for a large, reconfigurable, and potentially flexible structure whose inertia and center of mass change as tiles dock and reconfigure