Guidance Navigation and Controls; GNC) Engineer III

ASI is expanding its teams to support its current ramp-up across development work, customer projects, and product deployments. This is a full-time W-2 contract position. The selected candidate will interview with ASI and work as an integrated member of the ASI team. W-2 employment, payroll, and benefits will be administered through one of ASI's staffing partners. Development phases of this nature typically span up to project completion (typically 2-4 years), though scope and duration are driven by business needs.

The Guidance, Navigation, and Controls Engineer III develops, integrates, and validates algorithms that enable ASI's autonomous agricultural equipment to navigate fields, follow planned routes, maintain stable vehicle control, and complete assigned operations safely and accurately. This role works with vehicle dynamics, localization, state estimation, trajectory planning, path tracking, and feedback-control systems to support reliable autonomous operation in agricultural environments.

As a Level III engineer within ASI's five-level engineering structure, this position independently contributes to moderately complex GNC features and subsystem improvements while receiving guidance on broader architectural and system-level decisions. The role collaborates with perception, embedded software, systems, test, and field operations teams to improve autonomous equipment performance across changing terrain, vegetation, field conditions, weather, payloads, and agricultural workflows.

• Develop, implement, integrate, and validate guidance, navigation, and control algorithms for autonomous agricultural equipment
• Contribute to vehicle motion-control capabilities involving steering, propulsion, braking, speed control, path tracking, and trajectory following
• Develop and tune feedback-control algorithms to improve vehicle stability, accuracy, responsiveness, and operational performance
• Support navigation capabilities that allow autonomous equipment to move safely and efficiently through fields, headlands, access roads, and defined work areas
• Develop and improve localization and state-estimation solutions using GPS/GNSS, RTK positioning, inertial sensors, encoders, odometry, and vehicle feedback
• Contribute to trajectory-generation, route-planning, and path-planning solutions for agricultural operations
• Support capabilities involving field coverage, row following, headland turns, pass planning, overlap management, and work-area completion
• Support coordination between vehicle motion, attached implements, perception outputs, and task-planning software
• Own defined GNC features and moderately complex assignments from development through integration, testing, and field validation
• Develop and refine vehicle-dynamics and system-behavior models to support controller design, simulation, and performance analysis
• Tune control parameters on physical equipment across varying terrain, speed, payload, soil, traction, and operating conditions
• Evaluate GNC performance using simulation, recorded-data replay, software-in-the-loop testing, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and full-vehicle field testing
• Develop measurable performance criteria for assigned features, including path accuracy, tracking error, localization accuracy, stability, response time, and task completion
• Analyze vehicle logs and field data to identify control limitations, localization errors, unstable behavior, and operational edge cases
• Develop tools and scripts for simulation, data processing, visualization, automated testing, controller tuning, and performance analysis
• Troubleshoot issues involving vehicle control, localization, sensor timing, coordinate transformations, communication interfaces, and system…