Senior/ Principal Navigation Engineer

Senior/ Principal Navigation Engineer

About Vatn Systems:

Vatn Systems is an innovative startup at the forefront of designing and manufacturing autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Our mission is to revolutionize underwater security, exploration, research, and operations through cutting-edge technology and unparalleled engineering. Our AUVs are defining the next generation of underwater autonomy.

The Role

We are looking for a talented and motivated Navigation Engineer to join our growing team. In this role, you will be responsible for designing and implementing advanced inertial navigation algorithms for our AUV fleet, with a focus on high-precision positioning in GPS-denied environments. You will work at the intersection of applied mathematics and high-performance software engineering to ensure our vehicles operate reliably in demanding maritime conditions.

What You'll Do

• Design, develop, and implement state estimation and inertial navigation algorithms for real-time embedded systems.
• Develop and validate GPS-denied navigation solutions using multi-sensor fusion techniques.
• Integrate and process data from a variety of inertial, acoustic, and other environmental sensors to improve underwater navigation accuracy.
• Perform post-mission data analysis to extract actionable insights and drive continuous improvement of navigation performance.
• Support the development of test protocols to validate navigational accuracy in real-world conditions.
• Participate in on-water operations, including field testing and hardware troubleshooting.
• Collaborate with multidisciplinary engineering teams to translate system requirements into robust software solutions.

What You'll Need

Required Qualifications:

• Degree in Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical field.
• 7+ years experience with designing and developing Kalman filters, bias estimation & mitigation techniques, and other inertial navigation algorithms.
• Experience integrating and working with various grades of IMUs and aiding sensors.
• Strong software development skills with experience in low-level, performance-critical programming.
• Solid mathematical foundation in linear algebra, calculus, and control systems theory.
• Experience developing and implementing navigation or state estimation algorithms.
• Familiarity with sensor fusion techniques and probabilistic estimation methods.
• Experience with data analysis and visualization tools.
• Familiarity with version control systems.
• United States Citizen or Permanent Resident.

Nice-to-Haves:

• Experience with robotics middleware or modern robotics frameworks.
• Experience with Doppler Velocity Logs.
• Knowledge of SLAM, Visual Odometry, or related localization techniques.
• Familiarity with Linux operating systems and embedded systems development.
• Experience with maritime sensors, underwater acoustics, or subsea navigation technologies.