Robotics Engineer - #2635982

Senior / Staff Sensor Fusion Engineer

Location: Munich, Germany

Industry: Autonomous Aviation

Type: Full-time

Overview

This opportunity is within an early-stage aviation company transitioning from advanced prototypes to building its first operational aircraft.

A central challenge is enabling reliable autonomy in uncertain and dynamic environments. The company is developing a perception-driven autonomy stack and is seeking a Senior or Staff Sensor Fusion Engineer to define and implement the system that combines multi-modal sensor data into robust, real-time state estimates.

This is a high-ownership role with significant influence over architecture, algorithm design, and integration into flight-relevant systems.

Responsibilities

You will be responsible for designing and implementing multi-sensor fusion pipelines that combine data from cameras (RGB and thermal), IMU, GNSS, and LiDAR or radar. The role involves developing algorithms for 6-DoF pose estimation, visual-inertial odometry, and robust state estimation under uncertainty. This includes implementing and maintaining estimation frameworks such as Kalman filters or optimization-based approaches.

You will integrate outputs from vision and LiDAR perception systems into a unified fusion pipeline, ensuring consistency across coordinate frames, calibration, and timing. The work will require handling real-world challenges such as degraded sensing, partial observability, and sensor failures.

A key aspect of the role is bridging the fused state estimates into guidance systems and flight control loops. You will contribute to enabling capabilities such as precision landing in uncertain environments and tracking dynamic targets such as moving landing platforms. This requires close collaboration with guidance, navigation, and control engineers to ensure overall system stability and performance.

You will also deploy sensor fusion algorithms on onboard compute hardware, optimizing for low latency, deterministic behavior, and high reliability. The systems you build should be modular, scalable, and suitable for production environments.

The role involves participation in flight testing and real-world experiments, along with developing validation methodologies to assess estimation accuracy and robustness under noise and disturbances. You will contribute to tooling for logging, replay, and offline analysis to support rapid iteration.

Requirements

The ideal candidate has a strong background in robotics, autonomous systems, or navigation, along with proven experience building sensor fusion or state estimation systems. Practical experience with real-world deployment beyond purely simulated environments is essential.

From a technical perspective, you should have a solid understanding of probabilistic state estimation, including methods such as Kalman filtering or similar approaches, along with experience in modeling sensor noise and uncertainty propagation. Familiarity with visual-inertial systems, SLAM, or localization techniques is expected.

You should be comfortable working with data from multiple sensor modalities including cameras, IMU, GNSS, LiDAR, or radar, and have a strong grasp of calibration, synchronization, and coordinate systems.

Strong programming skills in C++ are required, along with proficiency in Python. Experience with robotics frameworks such as ROS or ROS2 and the ability to build reliable, production-quality software systems are important.

Additional Experience

Experience in UAVs, drones, or aviation systems would be beneficial but is not required. A background in safety-critical or high-reliability environments is also advantageous, as is experience working with tightly coupled perception and fusion systems. Familiarity with onboard or embedded compute platforms would be helpful.

Role Characteristics

This position offers a high level of ownership and influence over the design of a core system component. You will be working on a largely greenfield architecture with minimal legacy constraints, collaborating closely with perception, navigation, control, and hardware teams. Your work will have a direct impact on a real-world autonomous aircraft system.

Summary

This role is suited to an engineer who combines strong theoretical understanding of state estimation with practical experience building sensor fusion systems deployed in real-world environments. It offers the opportunity to define and deliver a critical part of an autonomy stack operating in dynamic, safety-critical conditions.