A viable design methodology to construct observers for a class of nonlinear systems is developed. The proposed technique is based on the off-line solution of a Riccati equation, and can be solved using commercially available software packages. For globally valid results, the class of systems considered is characterized by globally Lipschitz nonlinearities. Local results relax this assumption to only a local requirement. For a more general description of nonlinear systems, the methodology yields approximate observers, locally. The proposed theory is used to design an observer for a single-link flexible joint robot. This observer estimates the robot link variables based on the joint measurements.