State Estimation and Navigation Engineer

About Askari Defense

Modern warfare is dictated by robotics. Autonomous bombing drones and robotic ground systems are reshaping every battlefield on Earth. Any nation that cannot stop them loses.

Askari develops high-performance, fully-autonomous kinetic intercept systems that counter unmanned aerial and robotic threats in the world's most demanding operational environments. We build deployable systems for real-world constraints, urgent missions, and operators who cannot wait years for capability, and are continuously evolving our systems because the robotic threat evolves daily.

We are a tight team of top engineers and scientists from Skydio, Hermeus, Near Earth Autonomy, Area-I/Anduril, Raytheon, Sandia National Laboratories, and GTRI. We work directly with elite end-users, turning emerging battlefield requirements into rugged, scalable, mission-ready defenses.

Come build alongside elite engineers on a generational mission to defend the Western world. Candidly, we hold ourselves to an exceptionally high bar: the work is demanding, the pace is intense, and the mission requires people willing to go all in. For the right person, it will be more rewarding than any previous job. Askari is a place for builders serious about mastery, ownership, exponential growth, and delivering capability when it matters most.

As warfare becomes increasingly robotic, distributed, and fast-moving, the defense industrial base needs a new model:
Askari is defining that model.

If protecting humanity from the coming age of robotic warfare is the mission you have been waiting for, this is where you do it.

About the role

This role is designed for a state estimation specialist who will eventually own the navigation and estimation problem end-to-end for our interceptor systems.

This is a deep individual-contributor role. You will work alongside our GNC and autonomy leads to shape, architect, and independently execute the state estimation solutions that deliver mission-critical capability.

Navigation in our domain is unforgiving. Our vehicles are low-SWaP and operate in GPS-contested environments , across high-dynamic flight regimes , against maneuvering targets, with hard real-time constraints and little margin for a bad estimate.

We are looking for someone who treats this as the central challenge it is, and who has the depth to drive a solution from first-principles observability analysis through flight-proven, embedded implementation.

We are looking for evidence-driven engineers: individuals who prioritize physical reality over opinion and have the technical conviction to derive the best solution as supported by data. In this role, that means bringing the judgment to know which estimator architecture the problem actually demands, the rigor to prove it against flight data, and the autonomy to test, troubleshoot, validate in flight, and deliver an effective solution.

What you'll do

You will lead the design and implementation of the navigation and estimation stack, from first-principles observability analysis through flight-proven embedded execution. You will work in close partnership with the guidance and controls teams, but the architecture, rigor, and validation of the estimation solution are yours to drive.

You will focus on problems in all of the following areas:

• Estimator Architecture & Design: Select and justify the estimator architecture the problem actually demands, including KF variants, factor graphs, and related approaches, grounded in observability analysis of the vehicle dynamics and sensor suite rather than defaulting to a familiar filter.
• State-Driven Guidance & Control Co-Design: Work across the estimation-G&C boundary to align the available state with the guidance and control laws the intercept requires, recognizing that estimator capability and achievable guidance are mutually constraining.
• GPS-Contested & Denied Navigation: Develop navigation solutions that hold up as GNSS degrades or disappears, maintaining a trustworthy state through the regimes where a bad estimate ends the mission.
• Multimodal Sensor Fusion: Fuse heterogeneous sensing, including inertial, GNSS, vision, and seeker/target sensors, into a coherent, real-time state under low-SWaP constraints.
• Robustness to Latency & Degradation: Handle delayed and asynchronous measurements, detect and ride through sensor degradation or outright failure, and inform the case for redundant or complementary sensing where the estimate demands it.
• Target-Relative…