Principal Engineer – Contested Autonomy and Navigation

Leidos•Huntsville, AL

2d•$131,300 - $237,350•Onsite

About The Position

Serve as a Principal Engineer for the Contested Autonomy and Navigation team. Our team’s mission is to develop and demonstrate contested autonomy and navigation technologies to meet urgent military operational needs to operate in contested, RF-challenged environments, and rapidly transition this technology to operational platforms to outpace real-world adversary threats. We support a variety of military autonomous vehicles including drones, unmanned underwater vehicles, and ground robots. Projects involve small teams of engineers working together to meet aggressive customer schedules aimed at near-term field demonstrations of emerging capabilities. Typical customers include Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Air Force Research Laboratory, Office of Naval Research (ONR), and Army engineering research centers. We are looking for an individual who enjoys leading teams and growing new work while also “keeping hands dirty” writing software and touching hardware. The position will involve a development of innovative solutions related to autonomous behavior generation, object detection, multi-vehicle collaboration, and GPS-denied navigation for autonomous vehicles.

Requirements

Bachelor’s Degree in Aerospace Engineering or related technical field (including Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or Aerospace Engineering) with 12+ years of experience or a Master’s Degree in advanced technical field with 10+ years of experience
Subject matter expertise in algorithm development for autonomy, robotics, unmanned systems, and GPS-denied navigation
10+ years of experience in C/C++, Python, and/or MATLAB
Experience leading research and development teams to successful outcomes in prototype projects for customers such as DARPA, SOCOM, Army DEVCOM, and AFRL
Successful history of business development activities including leadership roles in competitive white paper and proposal development that led to contract awards
Must be a US Citizen and have the ability to obtain and maintain a Secret security clearance

Nice To Haves

Doctorate in technical field listed above with 10+ years of experience
Active Top Secret clearance or above
Deep customer familiarity with one or two government defense research organizations
History of involvement with technical conferences and journals (frequent publications, serving as session chair, invited panel member, or journal editor, etc.)

Responsibilities

Manage and lead highly-technical projects related to autonomous systems operating in contested environments, with an emphasis on GPS-denied operations
Perform as a senior technical independent contributor for algorithm development (computer vision, optimal estimation, AI/ML, path planning, control algorithms) and software deployment to real-time edge systems
Recommend and develop new technical solutions and products in support of customer challenges under customer and internally funded research projects
Support business development activities including white papers, proposals, teaming discussions, technical conferences, and targeted marketing discussions with new customers
Support hardware / software integration and local field testing activities
Support travel for business development activities and customer-facing field demonstrations (not expected to be more than 10% of your time)