Autonomous Flight Controls Engineer - Cold-Weather Ops

Open People Network (OPN); Toronto; On-site; CAD 100,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Osprey Systems is building Canada’s sovereign counter-drone capability. We are a small founding team backed by Canadian defense innovation programs and paid civilian deployments.

You will guide, navigate, and control an autonomous aircraft in cold, GPS-denied environments with onboard sensing and ground cues, owning it from launch dynamics through mission completion. You will design and implement the guidance and control stack, build VIO-based navigation, and own flight-controller integration on

Qualifications

• 4+ years in GNC, robotics controls, or autonomous vehicle control with real hardware in the loop.
• Strong control theory and state estimation.
• Multirotor or fixed-wing flight dynamics experience.
• C++ for real-time control; Python for tooling and analysis.
• Source-level experience with PX4, ArduPilot, or Betaflight.
• Flight-test mindset with disciplined instrumentation and postmortems.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement the guidance and control stack: trajectory generation, dynamic guidance, and precision flight.
• Build navigation independent of satellite positioning: visual-inertial odometry and ground-sensor cues.
• Own flight-controller integration on open firmware and partition work between flight controller and onboard compute.
• Develop the launch sequence from cold start to mission flight.
• Tune precision timing for mission-critical onboard actions.
• Build the simulation environment and close the sim-to-real gap through flight tests.
• Run outdoor test campaigns and treat every flight as data.
• Help shape engineering culture, tooling, and hiring as the team grows.

Skills

GNC experience

Control theory

State estimation

Flight dynamics

C++ real-time

Python tooling

PX4

ArduPilot

Betaflight

Flight testing

Tools

PX4

ArduPilot

Betaflight

Git

Job description

Osprey Systems is building Canada’s sovereign counter-drone capability. We are a small founding team backed by Canadian defense innovation programs and paid civilian deployments.

You will guide, navigate, and control an autonomous aircraft in cold, GPS-denied environments with onboard sensing and ground cues, owning it from launch dynamics through mission completion. You will design and implement the guidance and control stack, build VIO-based navigation, and own flight-controller integration on