University of Wisconsin–Madison

Navigation Scientist / Engineer Intern at Dirac Labs, Inc.

Location: Madison, WI (on-site)
Duration: 12 weeks (Summer 2026), with potential extension to fall semester
Compensation: Competitive hourly rate, commensurate with experience
Reports To: CEO / Chief Scientist
Clearance: U.S. Citizens preferred

Deadline to Apply: April 29, 2026

About Dirac Labs

Dirac Labs is a pre-seed defense technology startup commercializing nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center diamond magnetometers for GPS-denied navigation. Our sensors achieve SQUID-class magnetic sensitivity in a chip-scale, room-temperature package. We are building the sensor-to-navigation software stack that turns raw magnetic field measurements into real-time position estimates for autonomous platforms operating without GPS.

We are a dual-use company with applications in national security and commercial sectors such as agriculture and industrial automation.

The Role

We are hiring a navigation scientist/engineer intern to develop and demonstrate a multi-sensor fusion navigation stack that combines magnetic field measurements from our quantum sensing stack with conventional sensors (inertial, vision, etc.).

The end goal is concrete: demonstrate GPS-denied positioning on a rover at a commercial partner site by the end of the internship. This won’t be a literature review or a simulation-only project. You will be writing code that runs on real hardware, processing real sensor data, and driving a real robot without GPS.

What You Will Build

Sensor Fusion Stack

  • Implement navigation filters fusing magnetic, inertial, and other sensor data into a single navigation state estimate

Physics-informed World Model Construction Pipeline

  • Design and implement the data pipeline that converts magnetic field observations from the rover into a spatial models with per-cell confidence metrics
  • Integrate datasets into a multi-modal world model for navigation

Navigation

  • Implement a navigation filter that leverages the navigation world model for real-time navigation
  • Characterize positioning accuracy in various scenarios and test in real-world environments

Partner Demonstration

  • Deploy the full stack at a commercial partner facility (warehouse or factory environment)
  • Collect field data, build a site-specific navigation world model
  • Document results, failure modes, and performance metrics in a technical report suitable for investor and government customer audiences

Required Qualifications

  • Currently enrolled in an MS or PhD at UW–Madison in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, Physics, or a closely related field
  • Hands-on experience with ROS/ROS2 and real robot hardware (not just simulation)
  • Strong implementation skills in Python and/or C++ for real-time sensor processing and state estimation. We care about code that works on hardware, not code that works in a notebook.
  • Coursework or project experience in at least two of: inertial navigation / state estimation, Bayesian filtering (EKF, UKF, particle filters), visual odometry or SLAM, sensor fusion
  • Comfort working independently in a fast-paced startup environment with minimal supervision. You will have direct access to the CEO, but no one will be assigning you tickets.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience with magnetometer calibration (hard iron / soft iron compensation)
  • Familiarity with GTSAM, Ceres Solver, or similar factor graph / optimization frameworks
  • Experience with vision pipelines (ORB-SLAM3, RTAB-Map, OpenCV stereo matching)
  • Experience with fiducial detection systems
  • Prior work on autonomous ground vehicles, AGVs, or mobile robots in unstructured environments
  • Familiarity with Gaussian process regression or spatial statistics
  • Publications or thesis work in navigation, SLAM, or sensor fusion

What You Get

  • Direct mentorship from the founder/CEO, an experimental physicist building navigation hardware and algorithms from first principles
  • Your work ships. The fusion stack you build becomes the foundation of a product, not a conference paper that sits on a shelf.
  • Exposure to defense technology commercialization, venture-backed startup operations, and government contracting (SBIR/STTR, DARPA, ONR)
  • Potential to convert to a full-time navigation engineer role with equity
  • Co-authorship on any publications or patent filings resulting from your work

How to Apply

This internship is offered through the Graduate School Industry Internship Program. First, carefully read the eligibility information on the Graduate School Industry Internship Program webpage.

Apply for this internship by April 29, 2026.