About Mach Industries

Founded in 2023, Mach Industries is a rapidly growing defense technology company focused on developing next-generation autonomous defense platforms. At the core of our mission is the commitment to delivering scalable, decentralized defense systems that enhance the strategic capabilities of the United States and its allies. With a workforce of approximately 350 employees, we operate with startup agility and ambition.

Our vision is to redefine the future of warfare through cutting-edge manufacturing, innovation at speed, and unwavering focus on national security. We are dedicated to solving the next generation of warfare with lethal systems that deter kinetic conflict and protect global security.

The Role

Mach Industries is seeking a Principal Navigation Engineer to lead the development, integration, and flight validation of navigation systems for autonomous aircraft and related defense platforms. You will own the technical architecture, performance, and maturation of navigation solutions across all mission phases while leading the execution and development of the Navigation team.

This is a hands-on engineering leadership role combining principal-level technical authority, team execution, and people management. You will define navigation architecture, solve challenging estimation and integration problems, establish engineering rigor, develop engineering talent, and ensure navigation capabilities meet program objectives from requirements development through flight test.

The ideal candidate combines deep expertise in state estimation, inertial navigation, sensor fusion, and navigation system integration with decisive technical leadership, sound engineering judgment, and effective people leadership. Success requires translating ambiguous mission needs into clear technical plans, balancing rigor with program speed, and fielding reliable navigation systems in challenging operating environments.

Key Responsibilities

Navigation Architecture and Technical Ownership

Own the technical architecture, roadmap, execution, and delivery of navigation capabilities across requirements, design, implementation, verification, integration, and flight test.
Translate mission objectives and vehicle concepts into navigation requirements, sensor specifications, interface definitions, performance budgets, verification criteria, engineering plans, and team deliverables.
Design, analyze, and mature navigation algorithms, including inertial navigation, state estimation, sensor fusion, sensor calibration, alignment, integrity monitoring, and fault detection and isolation.
Develop robust estimation solutions that account for sensor noise, bias, drift, timing errors, misalignment, environmental disturbances, vehicle dynamics, computational constraints, and modeling uncertainty.
Establish rigorous methods for evaluating estimator observability, convergence, consistency, robustness, integrity, and degraded-mode behavior.
Lead technical discussions and design reviews, ensuring architecture and algorithm decisions are supported by appropriate analysis, test evidence, and system-level reasoning.
Identify technical deficiencies and risks, establish corrective-action and mitigation plans, and drive issues to resolution.
Serve as the technical authority for navigation architecture, algorithm design, sensor selection, and significant technical trade studies.

Performance Analysis, Implementation, and Flight Validation

Lead navigation performance analysis, uncertainty quantification, covariance analysis, Monte Carlo simulation, sensitivity studies, and error-budget development across nominal and off-nominal conditions.
Develop and maintain navigation simulation models, sensor error models, and software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop verification workflows.
Drive production implementation of navigation algorithms in embedded, real-time software, reviewing numerical stability, computational efficiency, coordinate conventions, timing, initialization, and fault-handling behavior.