About the Role Join a small engineering team at a defense technology company developing autonomous systems to counter drone threats. As a senior individual contributor, you will own the precision motion control stack, from control architecture and state estimation to hardware testing and field characterization. What You'll Do • Design and tune precision pointing and tracking control loops, including closed-loop control from sensor input to actuator command. • Build state estimation and sensor fusion across IMUs, encoders, and vision feedback. • Identify and model gimbal, mount, and actuator dynamics, then compensate for resonance, backlash, friction, saturation, and other nonlinearities. • Develop simulation and hardware-in-the-loop infrastructure to validate controls and reduce the sim-to-real gap. • Characterize system performance on hardware and during field testing, and document control designs and tuning standards. What We're Looking For • At least 4 years of robotics experience, including designing and tuning closed-loop controllers on physical motion hardware. • Strong grounding in classical and state-space control, including LQR and MPC, with experience applying these methods to real systems. • Hands-on state estimation and sensor fusion experience using Kalman, EKF, UKF, or complementary filters. • Experience with system identification, frequency-domain tuning, resonance compensation, and managing latency and jitter in real-time loops. • Modern C++ for real-time control, plus Python or MATLAB/Simulink for modeling and analysis. • Familiarity with servo drives, brushless motors, encoders, and IMUs, and the ability to work across mechanical, electrical, and software disciplines. • Experience building control simulations and validating them against hardware. Compensation & Benefits Base salary: $180,000 to $200,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available. Location On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.