Senior Guidance, Navigation & Control; GNC Engineer

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Askari is building a new class of autonomous kinetics for the age of robotic warfare. We engineer high-performance capabilities for national security operators in the world’s most demanding environments, purpose-built to kinetically counter unmanned aerial and robotic threats (C-UAS/C-UxS).

We design for real-world constraints, rapid iteration, and immediate deployment, prioritizing fielded capability rather than research demos or shelfware.

Askari moves at a different speed. Our team is composed of engineers who spearheaded programs at organizations including Skydio, Sandia National Laboratories, Hermeus, Area-I/Anduril, Raytheon, GTRI, and Near Earth Autonomy. We work directly with elite end-users to translate battlefield requirements into deployable systems. Backed by top-tier investors and partners across defense and aerospace, Askari is a small, execution-driven team focused on delivering real capability, fast.

• End-to-End Ownership: You own large portions of our autonomous systems from concept through fielding. There is no hand-off; you help design it, build it, fly it, and deploy it.
• National Impact: Our work produces immediate, real-world impact for national security, delivering direct capability to operators in the field.
• Exponential Growth: You’ll stretch across technical domains, take on hard problems, and grow faster than you would in a traditional engineering org.
• Elite Talent Density: You will build alongside a small, highly focused team of top engineers and operators in the industry.

This is a hands-on, multidisciplinary Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) role with absolute ownership. You will be responsible for a portion of the autonomy stack, from first-principles physics and theoretical modeling to real-time software implementation and rigorous flight analysis.

We are looking for high-conviction engineers who prioritize physical reality over opinion and have the technical skills to defend their designs with data. Among other things, you will derive theoretical guidance laws
, implement advanced filtering to robustify vehicle state estimation in contested environments, and fine-tune low-level controllers
.

This role is built for experienced engineers who drive a multidisciplinary design process, owning the software stack from first-principles analysis through software implementation/execution
, resulting in high-performance, robust autonomous navigation. You will bridge the sim-to-real gap using SITL/HITL testing and simulation to achieve precise, reliable autonomous flight.

• Guidance & Path Planning: Design and implement advanced guidance laws and trajectory optimization for high-speed interceptors operating across highly nonlinear, high-dynamic flight regimes
  .
• Navigation & State Estimation: Lead development of target tracking and GPS-contested navigation
  , using multimodal sensor fusion (KF-variants, real-time filters, factor graphs, etc.) to ensure robust performance in dynamic environments.
• Low-level Controls: Design high-performance active control systems (LQR, MPC, etc.) for highly maneuverable, aerodynamically unstable vehicles.

• Simulation & Validation: Digital-twin replication and high-fidelity physics modeling.
• Flight Regimes: High-speed multirotor and rocket systems;
  nonlinear dynamics and transition maneuvers.
• Control & Aerodynamics: Advanced control architectures, including LQR, Model Predictive Control (MPC), etc.
• Estimation: EKF, UKF, VIO, and high-G target tracking.
• Frameworks & Stack: ROS/ROS2 and other custom, lightweight middleware
  ; C/C++ and Python.
• Real-Time Systems: Deployment on STM
  32, Jetson, and (foreseeably) FPGA platforms
  , including implementation in RTOS/Linux
  , low-level control-loop tuning, and high-rate telemetry analysis.

• Education: Master’s or PhD in a relevant technical field.
• End-to-End Ownership: Extensive experience in a high-intensity environment with ownership of specific systems from concept through flight.
• Travel: Willingness and ability to travel as required to support rigorous flight testing.