Controls Engineer (Autonomous Flight

Osprey Systems is building Canada’s sovereign counter-drone capability. Our distributed detection and interception system is designed for the environments where everything else fails: extreme cold, GPS-denied, and network-degraded conditions. We serve critical infrastructure operators and defense customers with a single product line, built in Canada.

We are a small founding team backed by a clear funding pathway through Canadian defense innovation programs and paid civilian deployments.

Guidance, navigation, and control for a small, fast, autonomous aircraft operating without satellite navigation, in wind and cold, guided by onboard sensing and cues from ground systems. You own it from launch dynamics through mission completion.

• Design and implement the guidance and control stack: trajectory generation, dynamic guidance, and precision flight in demanding conditions.
• Build navigation independent of satellite positioning: visual-inertial odometry, cued handoff from ground sensors, and dead reckoning.
• Own flight-controller integration on open firmware and partition work between flight controller and onboard compute.
• Develop the launch sequence: cold start from a stored state, rapid stabilization, transition to mission flight.
• Tune precision timing for mission-critical onboard actions.
• Build the simulation environment and close the sim-to-real gap through disciplined flight test.
• Run outdoor test campaigns through an Alberta winter, treating every flight as data.
• Help shape engineering culture, tooling, and hiring as the team grows.

• 4+ years in GNC, robotics controls, or autonomous vehicle control with real hardware in the loop.
• Strong control theory and state estimation: derive it, implement it, tune it on a real vehicle.
• Multirotor or fixed-wing flight dynamics experience.
• C++ for real-time control;
  Python for tooling and analysis.
• Source-level experience with PX4, Ardu Pilot, or Beta flight – not just configuration.
• Flight-test mindset with disciplined instrumentation and postmortems.

Advanced guidance-law experience; visual-inertial odometry and GPS-denied navigation; high-speed FPV flying; aerodynamics exposure; cold-weather flight operations; early-stage startup experience.

Outdoor flight testing in Alberta, including winter conditions.