Embedded Linux & Video Pipeline Engineer

About Remote Robotic Systems

Help build advanced systems operating at the intersection of aerospace, robotics, and defence technology.

Help build advanced systems operating at the intersection of aerospace, robotics, and defence technology.

Remote Robotic Systems (RRS) is a Canadian robotics and defence-tech company helping organizations deploy enterprise-grade drones, uncrewed aircraft, robotic platforms, sensors, payloads, and remote operations technologies for mission-critical applications.

Our solutions support customers across defence, public safety, security, industrial, infrastructure, energy, and government sectors.

Through our Airmetal team, we develop advanced aerospace, communications, and autonomous systems designed for demanding real‑world environments.

We're a small, fast-moving engineering team that values ownership, technical depth, practical problem solving, and the ability to turn ambitious ideas into working hardware.

Airmetal is looking for an Embedded Linux & Video Pipeline Engineer to own a latency-critical video stack from camera capture through secure wireless transport.

You will work from camera capture on an ARM SoC through hardware encoding, encryption, packetization, and transport while building the instrumentation needed to show where every millisecond goes. You will also bring the stack up on new boards alongside the hardware team.

This is product ownership rather than a ticket queue. You will have the opportunity to shape the architecture, measurement approach, development tools, and production-readiness criteria for a critical subsystem.

We're looking for an engineer who profiles before optimizing, enjoys debugging across hardware and software boundaries, and wants to see software operate on real hardware.

• Own the embedded video pipeline from sensor capture and V4L2 through hardware encoding, encryption, packetization, transport, and receiver-side validation.
• Build per-stage latency instrumentation, establish baselines, and drive measurable improvements.
• Develop and maintain Linux camera and media components including V4L2, CSI-2, media-controller graphs, DMA paths, device tree, and vendor VPU integrations.
• Tune hardware encoders for low-latency operation while balancing quality, bandwidth, buffer behaviour, and resilience to packet loss.

• Own the embedded Linux image and platform workflow using Buildroot or Yocto, including boot, root file system, updates, and deployability.
• Bring up the software stack on new hardware and debug across the kernel, drivers, board, and laboratory equipment.
• Carry and maintain platform or vendor patches where required.

• Integrate video transport with the wireless link stack and tune stream behaviour for real link conditions.
• Build bench and receiver-side tools that make performance, reliability, and field issues observable.
• Define automated tests, soak tests, counters, and release criteria for the video subsystem.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent demonstrated experience.
• Strong professional embedded Linux development experience on ARM-based products.
• Advanced C skills and hands-on experience reading or modifying Linux kernel or driver code.
• Practical camera or media-pipeline experience with V4L2, CSI-2, media-controller concepts, buffer management, or closely related systems.
• Experience with hardware video encoders, M, vendor VPUs, or another embedded encode path.
• Experience with Buildroot, Yocto, or a comparable embedded Linux build system.
• A quantitative approach to latency, throughput, profiling, and regression detection.
• Methodical debugging across hardware and software using tools such as ftrace, perf, oscilloscopes, or logic analyzers.
• Able to work on-site in Kanata, Ontario.

• TI K3-family, AM6x, or J7x experience, or deep experience with another vendor BSP.
• GStreamer development, especially low-latency pipelines or custom elements.
• Streaming security, AEAD ciphers, hardware crypto acceleration, or key-management integration.
• RTP or UDP transport design, forward-error correction, lossy-network behaviour, monitor mode, or raw 802.11 work.
• Board bring-up, DDR or boot-media debugging, FPGA familiarity, or real-time systems experience.
• Experience in UAVs, robotics, defence, video links, broadcast, automotive cameras, or edge-video products.

• You profile first and optimize from evidence.
• You can debug across the kernel, camera pipeline, board, and network rather than treating them as separate systems.
• You build tools and tests that make system behaviour visible to the rest of the team.
• You take ownership from first bring-up through field reliability.
• You communicate complex technical findings clearly across disciplines.

• Meaningful ownership of technically…