Navigation and Controls Engineer

About Us

At Intramotev, we are dedicated to revolutionizing the freight industry by liberating tons of freight from congested highways, reducing carbon emissions, and enhancing transportation efficiency. We are deploying self-propelled battery-electric railcars and vehicles to transform freight logistics and bring innovation to our rail network. Based in St. Louis, MO, we are committed to promoting industrial revitalization, saving lives, and minimizing the environmental impact of trucking and transportation.

We actively foster a work environment for every teammate that's welcoming, respectful and inclusive, with great opportunities for professional growth. Find your future with us.

We are deploying self-propelled battery-electric railcars and vehicles, and we're hiring a Navigation and Controls Engineer to own the software that gets them there safely: the code that turns a dispatched trip into a trajectory, the control laws that carry it out, and the logic that figures out where the vehicle actually is at any given moment. Rail removes the steering axis, which makes this a fundamentally 1-D constrained problem — longitudinal control, speed profiling, and stopping accuracy against several tons of moving railcar are the whole game rather than one axis of three.

You'll carry the algorithm from model through implementation through field validation, working against track files, consists, and the site-server messages that drive dispatch.

This is a full-time, 100% in-office role based in St. Louis, MO. You'll work with in a team of 3–10 engineers and engage in occasional domestic travel for testing, integration, demonstrations, and customer interactions.

• Motion Planning & Trajectory Generation: Write the software that turns a dispatched trip into a trajectory — from global route to local path, trajectory optimization, time parameterization, and replanning against constraints that change mid-trip.
• Control Law Design: Develop and tune control laws in MATLAB/Simulink using classical and modern control theory — state‑space methods, stability and margin analysis, and closed‑loop tuning against a plant model — built to run on an embedded real‑time target, not only in simulation.
• State Estimation & Sensor Fusion: Build Kalman‑filter‑based (KF/EKF/UKF) state estimation that fuses GNSS/INS and vehicle sensor data into a position, speed, and heading estimate a control law can safely act on, including degraded‑GNSS behavior.
• Vehicle Dynamics & Safety‑Critical Design: Bound what a controller can command against mass, grade, adhesion, braking, and propulsion limits, and treat failure modes, degraded modes, and fail‑safe behavior as part of the algorithm itself.
• Validation & Field Testing: Design test cases in simulation, analyze field‑test data, and close the loop between what the model predicted and what the vehicle did.
• Collaboration: Partner with the Perception team on sensor and localization inputs, with Embedded on the real‑time targets the algorithms run on, and with the Controls Simulation effort on the environment used to validate changes before they reach a vehicle.

Base salary: $90,000 - $110,000

Intramotev offers a comprehensive benefits package for all team members, including:

• Medical coverage: We cover 100% of employee medical premiums, plus low-cost dental and vision options.
• Vacation: Full-time employees enjoy unlimited paid time off.
• Equity: Full-time employees receive equity in the company.
• Parental leave: New parents receive paid time off to spend quality time with their family.

• 3 or more years of professional experience developing guidance, navigation, or control systems for vehicles, robots, or comparable dynamic platforms — shipped systems, not coursework alone.
• Classical and modern control theory in practice — state‑space methods, stability and margin analysis, closed‑loop tuning against a plant model, and the judgment to know when a simpler controller is the right answer.
• Model‑based design in MATLAB/Simulink, including the discipline of building models intended to run on an embedded…