Senior Guidance, Navigation & Control (GNC) Engineer

About the role

AION Robotics is a rapidly growing startup manufacturing advanced, rugged autonomous ground vehicles. We are bringing Industry 4.0 to outdoor commercial jobsites through the scaled deployment of turnkey autonomous products fully automating infrastructure monitoring and inspection tasks.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement robust vehicle control architectures optimized for real-time edge computing in challenging 3D outdoor environments.
• Develop and refine multi-sensor fusion frameworks combining advanced odometry, IMU calibration/filtering, GNSS, LiDAR, and vision-based localization.
• Control system development including motion control, advanced PID tuning, optimization-based model-predictive control strategies.
• Build and integrate navigation planners and mapping solutions with accurate transform calculations and geo-referencing.
• Develop safety-critical embedded systems for autonomous vehicles, including HIL (Hardware-in-the-Loop) simulation and low-level safety monitoring.
• Integrate and optimize communication and control over CAN bus, working closely with sensor and actuator drivers.
• Collaborate across hardware, software, and perception teams to ensure tightly coupled system integration.
• Provide electrical and sensor-level insights (including MEMS IMUs and other precision sensors) to improve vehicle stability, accuracy, and robustness.
• Contribute to ROS2-based system architecture, ensuring modular, reliable, and scalable implementations.

Qualifications

• Proven expertise in GNC engineering, ideally with autonomous vehicle or robotics applications.
• Strong background in sensor fusion, with hands-on experience integrating multiple odometry sources, IMUs, GNSS, LiDAR, and visual SLAM.
• Deep understanding of control systems, including motion control, advanced PID, and nonlinear/optimal control methods.
• Strong ROS2 experience, including navigation stacks, transform handling, and middleware integration.
• Hands-on experience with HIL simulation environments for control validation and tuning.
• Low-level embedded systems experience, including safety-critical architectures, CAN bus, and real-time firmware.
• Solid electrical engineering foundation with familiarity in MEMS sensors, calibration, and sensor-level signal processing.
• Strong programming skills (C++, Python, or embedded C).
• A track record of deploying robust control systems in real-world robotics or autonomous platforms.

Preferred Experience

• Background in off-highway, aerospace, defense, or rugged autonomous systems.
• Familiarity with GPU-accelerated or edge compute architectures (e.g., NVIDIA Jetson).
• Experience with redundancy strategies and fault-tolerant control.
• Strong understanding of 3D outdoor mapping, localization, and terrain-adaptive navigation.

Pay

$150,000.00 - $250,000.00/per year

Schedule

Full time