Lead Rover Navigation and Perception Engineer (Robotics)

Location: Fully remote, associated with Hawthorne, California

Salary: $142,000–$235,000 per year

Company

hirify.global designs and builds rovers, power systems, and data networks for sustained lunar operations.

What you will do

• Lead a small engineering team designing, characterizing, testing, verifying, and validating rover localization and perception systems.
• Develop navigation and perception solutions for the CLV-1 lunar rover from early design through flight operations.
• Work with flight software engineers to implement and test navigation, perception, and obstacle avoidance algorithms.
• Design and execute test campaigns with real sensors and flight computers in simulated and analog lunar environments.
• Ensure rover systems are robust, upgradable during flight, practical, and compliant with NASA human-rated spacecraft requirements.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in a STEM field or equivalent education and experience.
• 10+ years of experience designing, developing, and testing navigation, localization, and perception systems for rovers, autonomous vehicles, GPS-denied navigation systems, or similar robotic platforms.
• Practical experience with sensor fusion and Kalman filtering for wheeled vehicle navigation and perception.
• Experience combining different sensor modalities, such as IMUs, lidar, radar, and star trackers.
• Experience with C++ and Python programming.

Nice to have

• Experience developing, testing, and characterizing obstacle detection and avoidance algorithms for wheeled vehicles.
• Experience handling invalid data, dropped packets, data latency, blurry images, and other real-world system issues.
• Experience supporting navigation and localization systems through the full lifecycle, from early design to live vehicle operations.

Culture & Benefits

• Equity ownership in the company.
• Medical, dental, vision, and mental health benefits.
• 401(k) plan with company match.
• Flexible paid time off, parental leave, and home-office setup reimbursement.
• Some travel may be required; on-site meals, snacks, beverages, and monthly social hours are provided.

Hiring process

• Application review followed by a recruiter phone interview.
• Video interviews and an on-site interview.
• Offer and hiring decision.