Orbit Determination and Navigation Engineer

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Engineering Full Time AZ, US

2 days ago Requisition

Orbit Determination and Navigation Engineer

Level III–IV

Houston, TX

About Intuitive Machines:

Intuitive Machines is an innovative and cutting-edge space company making cislunar space accessible to both public and private customers. Our mission is to further science and exploration, communications, and economic progress from the Earth to the Moon and beyond. With multiple NASA lunar missions in development and additional private missions on our manifest, we pride ourselves in supporting NASA, our customers, and the nation in paving the way to return humans to the surface of the Moon.

Our world-class team includes experts in all aspects of spacecraft subsystems design, development, and test, on-orbit operations, and safety.

KinetX Aerospace, a subsidiary of Intuitive Machines, is a trusted engineering services and product company specializing in space navigation, flight dynamics, mission operations, communications, and systems engineering. As the first private company qualified by NASA for deep-space navigation, KinetX has supported some of the world’s most complex planetary missions, including MESSENGER, New Horizons, OSIRIS-REx, Lucy, and LunaH-Map. With a proven record spanning Earth-orbiting, suborbital, commercial, international, and deep-space missions, KinetX provides end-to-end expertise from early mission design through flight operations.

Its core capabilities include navigation and mission systems development, optical navigation, orbit determination, maneuver design, trajectory optimization, and constellation design and maintenance. Combined with Intuitive Machines’ spacecraft, network, and mission-operations capabilities, KinetX helps build, connect, and operate resilient space infrastructure for sustained exploration, advanced deep-space constellations, and communications networks.

About the Position:

We are seeking an Orbit Determination (OD) and Navigation Engineer at Level III (Lead) or Level IV (Technical Expert) to join the OD group within FDI. Level III engineers lead assigned OD efforts and guide others in technical execution and quality. Level IV engineers serve as technical experts for complex OD work across mission phases and oversee multiple analyses, products, and software capabilities.

Placement will reflect demonstrated competencies.

Responsibilities:

• Support daily OD solutions and trajectory reconstructions, covariance analyses, tracking data quality assessments, and evaluation of forces affecting spacecraft trajectories.
• Produce trajectory updates that support maneuver design, reference trajectories, and science observations. Responsibilities vary by level as described below.
• Lead complex OD analyses and product development for assigned efforts.
• Define estimation strategies and validation methods, diagnose residual and covariance issues, and establish quality checks that reduce solution risks.
• Serve as lead liaison with mission operations, customers, and engineering teams. Manage priorities, effort, schedules, and budgets across multiple projects and report progress and issues to management.
• Improve OD methods and software workflows, establish test approaches, review code, and guide other engineers.
• Oversee technical documentation and anticipate problems affecting mission objectives.

Additional Level IV responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership for complex OD efforts across mission phases. Determine estimation approaches, tracking data usage, observability strategies, support for optical navigation and maneuvers, and…