Senior Satellite GNC Engineer, Amazon Leo

Amazon Leo is building a constellation of thousands of low Earth orbit satellites to deliver fast, reliable internet beyond the reach of existing networks. As a Guidance, Navigation & Control engineer, you will design the algorithms, simulations, and onboard autonomy that keep every satellite precisely pointed and stable so the payload can serve customers below, and keep the fleet flying safely.

This is satellite GNC with demanding pointing and performance requirements, and you will see your work go from concept to orbit on a constellation that is launching and growing today. Amazon Leo will delight customers with reliable connectivity regardless of where they are.

In this role, you will:

• Take your GNC algorithms from concept all the way to orbit, and stay close to them through integration, test, and on-orbit operations
• Solve hard precise-pointing, payload-cueing, and fleet-autonomy problems against demanding performance requirements
• Work across the full lifecycle - design, simulation, test, and flight operations - rather than a narrow slice
• Join a small team of some of the top GNC engineers in the industry, building a product people will love to use

This position is part of the Satellite Attitude Determination and Control team, where we own the full lifecycle of our work - from algorithm design and flight software, through lab integration, to flying our own satellites on orbit. You will design and analyze the control system and algorithms, support development of our flight hardware and software, help integrate the satellite in our labs, and operate the GNC system in flight as a constellation of satellites flows through the production line into orbit.

Export Control Requirement: Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum.

Key job responsibilities

• Design and analyze algorithms for state estimation, attitude determination and control, precise pointing, and payload cueing against demanding performance requirements.
• Write the production C++ flight code that runs these algorithms on the satellite. Our GNC engineers own their algorithms all the way into flight software, working alongside software development engineers rather than handing prototypes off to be reimplemented by another team.
• Design concepts of operation that balance pointing and payload cueing, momentum management, power, thermal, and communications across all phases of the mission, including off-nominal and contingency scenarios.
• Develop momentum management strategies using reaction wheels and magnetic torquers, and help size and lay out the GNC sensor and actuator suite - star trackers, magnetometers, sun sensors, IMUs, and GPS receivers - and the algorithms that consume them.
• Develop onboard autonomy, including Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery, so the fleet operates safely at scale with minimal intervention.
• Develop and validate models and simulations of the satellite and constellation across a range of fidelity levels, including 6-DOF time-domain simulation and Monte Carlo analysis, and run hardware-in-the-loop testing to verify closed-loop performance.
• Support component-level environmental testing, functional and performance checkout, and subsystem and satellite integration in our labs.
• Analyze fleet telemetry in bulk and build the metrics, dashboards, and tooling that let us monitor and continuously improve pointing performance and payload operations time as the constellation grows.
• Operate the GNC system on orbit - reviewing fleet data, supporting maneuvers, and resolving anomalies when on-orbit behavior diverges from the ground model.
• Contribute to architecture, design, and code reviews, and document your algorithms, analyses, and results clearly.

A day in the life

This role spans a diverse set of problems across the spacecraft and network system. You will derive and prototype estimation and control algorithms, turn them into production flight code, and prove them out through 6-DOF and Monte Carlo simulation and hardware-in-the-loop testing in the lab. You will support satellite integration, and when something on orbit does not behave the way the ground model predicted, you will dig into fleet telemetry to find out why and drive the fix. You will own problems end to end and have the focus to go deep on each one.

Because GNC sits at the center of safe flight, you will work across the whole program. The payload, power, thermal, and operations teams all depend on GNC, so you will balance their needs against your pointing and momentum budgets. To get your algorithms running reliably on the spacecraft, you will partner closely with avionics, flight software, and our embedded software development engineers. You will help the mechanical teams shape the next generation of satellite hardware, from reaction wheels to star trackers. And as satellites move from design through manufacturing into orbit, you will work alongside systems engineering and Assembly, Integration & Test.

The problems are genuinely hard - demanding pointing and performance requirements, a large constellation to keep flying safely, and the chance to invent advanced capabilities that have not been built before. The work is staffed with some of the strongest engineers in the industry, and the constant collaboration across teams makes it a place to keep learning and growing.

About the team

Our team brings deep experience across many satellite systems and other flight vehicles, with real bench strength in both our mission and the core GNC disciplines. We design, prototype, test, iterate, and learn together, and because GNC is central to safe flight, we tend to drive Concepts of Operation and many of the system-level analyses on the program.

We also have a lot of freedom. We trust our engineers to pursue the problems they face in whatever way they find best, to choose their own tools and approaches, and to own the results. If you want the autonomy to solve hard problems your way, and a team of strong engineers to do it with, you will feel at home here.