Senior Software/Robotics Engineer in Burlington

Thank you for exploring opportunities at Ribbit! We look forward to speaking with you.

Company Founded in 2020, Ribbit builds and operates autonomous airplanes. We develop technology that enables uncrewed gate-to-gate operations, having completed hundreds of autonomous flight hours on different aircraft, flown 10K+ hours in simulation, and secured flight authorities for remotely and optionally piloted flight. From defending sovereignty to delivering food and medical supplies, we are a trusted partner that businesses and governments rely on to test, operate, and deploy affordable autonomous aircraft.

Position Overview

As a Senior State Estimation Engineer, you will collaborate with peers to:

• Lead development of the state estimation stack, shaping its architecture and roadmap, leading design reviews, and holding the bar on code quality.
• Research, design and develop systems for handling degraded or denied GNSS signals, ensuring a reliable aircraft state estimate when satellite navigation is jammed, spoofed, or unavailable.
• Own the sensor suite deployed on our aircraft: from selection, calibration, time synchronisation, and health monitoring, to research into what new sensors the aircraft should carry next.
• Stay hands-on: write production C++, review handwritten code, and prototype/compare various estimation and sensing approaches.
• Deploy tools for analyzing and providing quality metrics of state estimates for downstream users, establishing what the estimator can provide and the extent to which its outputs can be trusted.
• Represent the estimation team in design reviews with the navigation, controls, hardware, and flight-test teams.
• Onboard and mentor junior engineers that join the team.

Your key objectives will include:

• Designing and implementing estimators that output the aircraft's state (e.g. EKF, error-state KF, UKF, factor-graph methods), including INS mechanisation, GNSS/INS integration.
• Developing vision-based navigation that limits drift on long flights without GNSS, such as visual-inertial odometry, image-to-map matching, and landmark and runway detection.
• Fusing a wide range of sensors: IMUs, multi-antenna GNSS, magnetometers, air data, barometric, radar and laser altimeters, cameras, and LiDAR.
• Estimating wind, air data, and height above terrain accurately enough to support automatic takeoff, approach, flare, and landing.
• Building fault detection and integrity monitoring into the estimator (e.g. innovation gating, cross-checks, jamming and spoofing detection, protection levels).
• Writing production C++ that runs in real time on the aircraft, tested against recorded flight logs, simulation, HIL, and flight.

Other Details:

• No. of Positions: 1
• Duration: Permanent Full-Time, starting December 2026
• Base Compensation: $153,920 to $168,480
• This is a hybrid role involving remote work and on-site presence to support field tests—you must be in the Greater Toronto Area or willing to relocate.
• Competitive and comprehensive compensation (e.g. 3 weeks of vacation upon joining, comprehensive health and wellness plans).
• You must be eligible to hold a Government of Canada security clearance at the Reliability or Secret level, and pass security assessment for the Controlled Goods Program.

Qualifications

As the ideal candidate, you meet the following requirements:

• A university degree in aerospace, electrical, mechanical, or software engineering, computer science, robotics, or a related field.
• Experience developing state estimation or navigation software that has run on real hardware.
• Modern C++ on Linux with Eigen, and estimation or vision libraries (e.g. GTSAM, Ceres, OpenCV).
• A strong foundation in probabilistic estimation: recursive and batch estimation techniques (linear/nonlinear Kalman filters and their variants), factor graphs, optimisation techniques, observability analysis, and covariance tuning.
• Experience with inertial navigation systems and GNSS/INS integration, including IMU error modelling, attitude representations, and coordinate frames.
• Experience developing state estimation/localization approaches without GNSS using alternative sensors, particularly vision (e.g. visual odometry, VIO, visual SLAM, map matching).
• Experience integrating and calibrating various sensors (e.g. intrinsics and extrinsic sensor calibration, time synchronisation, etc.).
• Python or MATLAB for analysis, filter tuning, and flight-log post-processing.

Preferred and bonus qualifications include experience with:

• Developing and/or flight-testing autonomous aircraft or drones in a professional setting.
• Aircraft-specific sensing modalities: air data, angle of attack and sideslip, wind estimation, and radar or laser altimetry.
• Alternate methods for localizing/navigating without GNSS: terrain-referenced navigation, LiDAR localisation, or signals of opportunity.
• Integrity monitoring (e.g. RAIM, protection levels) and detecting GNSS jamming and spoofing.
• Commercial GNSS/INS units (e.g. NovAtel SPAN, VectorNav, SBG), or running vision on embedded or GPU hardware.
• Safety-critical standards and processes (e.g. DO-178C, MISRA C++, static analysis).

You also possess the soft skills to work in a high-stakes, tight-knit company, such as:

• Openness to give and receive feedback.
• Adaptability when priorities move.
• Self-awareness about your own strengths and gaps.
• Taking initiative with minimal guidance.

Compensation: $153,920.00 - $168,480.00 per year.