VIO/SLAM Engineer

Company Description The Vydar Group develops advanced electronics for navigation systems for NATO-friendly nations, with a focus on strengthening European technological autonomy. The team specializes in AI-driven navigation, tracking, and detection solutions for defense applications, including missile systems, aircraft, drones, and distributed sensing networks. Vydar builds its technology entirely in-house, from proprietary hardware to software and control systems, ensuring full control over performance, security, and supply chain with no reliance on restricted or foreign components. Team members work in a flat, collaborative, innovation-driven environment with direct access to the founding team and the opportunity to contribute to high-impact technology with real-world relevance in European defense.As a VIO/SLAM Engineer at The Vydar Group, you will be central to developing our next-generation autonomous navigation stack for GPS-denied environments. You will work closely with the founding team and hardware partners to take localisation algorithms from research to field-deployable embedded systems. You will design and implement state-of-the-art visual-inertial odometry and SLAM pipelines optimised for constrained embedded hardware, spanning sensor fusion, map matching, real-time trajectory estimation, and machine vision across platforms including drones, missiles, and high-performance aircraft. Daily tasks include developing and optimising VIO and SLAM algorithms for real-time operation, designing map matching pipelines that integrate prior map data with live sensor streams, integrating visual, inertial, and additional modality sensors into a robust fusion architecture, and applying machine vision techniques for feature extraction, depth estimation, and scene understanding. You will profile and optimise algorithm performance under strict CPU, memory, and power budgets, including offloading algorithms to their corresponding hardware accelerators. You will also contribute to hardware-software co-design decisions and design and execute verification, simulation, and field-test campaigns for localisation accuracy. You will join a team of 20 to 25 highly skilled engineers with backgrounds in aerospace, microelectronics, embedded hardware and software, and machine vision. This is a full-time, on-site role based in Delft.Qualifications3+ years of hands-on experience in VIO, SLAM, or closely related navigation and localisation fields. A formal degree is not required; relevant background in robotics, computer vision, or navigation is welcome, provided you have the hands-on experience.Demonstrated work with map matching, aligning live sensor data to prior maps under real-world conditions.Practical machine vision experience, such as neural network-based feature detection, depth estimation, or optical flow for navigation.Experience deploying algorithms on constrained embedded hardware (e.g. ARM Cortex-A/R, FPGAs, or custom ASICs).Proficiency in C++ and/or Rust for real-time algorithm development.Strong understanding of sensor fusion, including IMU pre-integration, EKF/UKF, or factor graph-based backends.Ability to optimise for latency and memory constraints without sacrificing localisation accuracy.Familiarity with GTSAM/Ceres Solver, NPU optimisation, or avionics.MIL-spec standards is a plus. Startup or R&D experience is also beneficial.Good communication in English (Dutch is a plus), and the ability to work on-site in Delft.NATO-friendly citizenship.