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
Design the electromagnetic and reaction-wheel control that brings tiles together and holds them through capture
Lead trade studies and sizing for the GNC sensor and actuator suite (reaction wheels, magnetorquers, thrusters, star trackers, sun sensors, rate sensors, GNSS, relative-navigation sensors)
Define vehicle-level GNC requirements and concepts of operations balancing thermal, power, momentum, communications, and fault management
Verify algorithms end to end in simulation, on HITL testbeds, and in flight, and validate the simulation's models against test data
Support flight operations, monitor on-orbit health and performance, lead on-orbit anomaly investigations, and drive on-orbit reliability of the GNC system

Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in aerospace/mechanical/electrical engineering, physics, mathematics, robotics, or other relevant engineering discipline
Software development experience in C++ and Python

Preferred Qualifications

Master's or PhD in an engineering discipline or physics; 2+ years (Engineer) or 5+ years (Senior Engineer) of professional GNC experience in spacecraft or robotics