During your internship at Wingtra, you will be fully onboarded into the highly cross-functional team developing the flight behavior of Wingtra’s current and future drones. You will get the opportunity to work on real-world applied robotics problems with a focus on guidance, navigation and control, contributing to features that directly influence how our aircraft flies, navigates, handles disturbances and reacts to failures.
Your solutions will be used by customers operating in challenging environments worldwide. Beyond the technical work, you will take part in the daily life of the team, including technical discussions, flight-test preparation, reviews, feedback sessions and team events. We want to support your growth in a professional engineering environment that goes beyond the purely technical domain.
You will get hands-on experience across the full development cycle: from analyzing flight data and identifying improvement opportunities, to developing algorithms and embedded software, validating them in simulation and finally testing them on real aircraft. Your work will contribute to flight performance, robustness, safety and autonomy in customer-relevant scenarios.
The earliest starting date is August/September and duration will be 5 to 6 months or longer - applications for later in the year cannot be given priority. Thank you for understanding.
Responsibilities
- Explore, develop and deploy embedded C/C++ software features for the WingtraRAY platform and upcoming products
- Support the development, tuning and validation of flight control, state estimation, trajectory generation, transition and failsafe logic
- Work with simulation and real flight data to validate new flight features before deployment
- Contribute to the Wingtra firmware codebase, including sensor integration, actuator logic, failsafe strategies and communication between system components
- Analyze flight and system logs from internal testing and customer operations, and extend our Python-based log analysis and debugging toolchain
- Design and execute automated tests, hardware-in-the-loop or simulation campaigns, and in-field drone tests for your code
- Work closely with QA, hardware, production and app teams to ensure robust system integration and reliable product behavior
- Participate in team meetings, technical discussions, code reviews, feedback sessions and company-wide all-hands meetings
Requirements
- You finished your B.Sc. and are pursuing a M.Sc. degree in Software / Robotics / Mechatronics Engineering or a related technical field
- Strong interest in flight dynamics, guidance, navigation, control and estimation
- Comfortable developing in C / C++ and interested in embedded real-time and resource-constrained software systems
- Comfortable working in Python for data analysis, visualization and handling large time-series datasets
- Solid understanding of control systems, system dynamics, signal processing, linear algebra, recursive estimation and optimisation fundamentals
- Hungry to learn, with strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently on technical problems
- Good interpersonal and communication skills, with a good command of spoken and written English
- Collaborative, self-motivated and open to feedback, with a strong sense of ownership and engineering responsibility
- EU citizenship or enrollment in a Swiss institution required to comply with work-permit regulations.
Plus
- Familiarity with git, code review, CI and AI-assisted development workflows
- Experience with PX4, ArduPilot, MAVLink, Dronecode SDK or other UAV/autopilot software stacks
- Hands on experience with system identification and control tuning
- Experience with soldering, electronics debugging or hands-on robotics work
- Driving license (B)
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree completed and currently pursuing a Master's in Software, Robotics, Mechatronics Engineering or related
- Strong interest in flight dynamics, guidance, navigation, control and estimation
- Experience developing in C/C++ for embedded, real-time, resource-constrained systems
- Experience with Python for data analysis, visualization and handling large time-series datasets
- Solid understanding of control systems, system dynamics, signal processing, linear algebra, recursive estimation and optimisation fundamentals
- Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work independently
- Good spoken and written English and interpersonal communication skills
- Collaborative, self-motivated, open to feedback, strong sense of ownership
- EU citizenship or enrollment in a Swiss institution (work-permit compliance)
- Familiarity with git, code review, CI and AI-assisted development workflows
- Experience with PX4, ArduPilot, MAVLink, Dronecode SDK or other UAV/autopilot stacks
- Hands-on experience with system identification and control tuning
- Experience with soldering, electronics debugging or hands-on robotics work
- Driving license (B)
What We Do
Wingtra is the world's leading VTOL drone producer, headquartered in Switzerland. Since its market entry in early 2017, Wingtra has partnered with more than 80 of the biggest surveying equipment dealers across 50+ countries worldwide. Based in the heart of Zurich, Switzerland, Wingtra houses 100+ employees, out of which more than 40 focus on R&D. The majority of Wingtra's engineers are graduates of one of the best science universities in the world, ETH Zurich. The same engineers design and assemble drones in-house and form Wingtra's support team, which is based in Europe and the Americas. Our WingtraOne drone carries best-in-class sensors that collect survey-grade aerial data. This technologically-superior VTOL UAV is used by mapping professionals for applications that range from surveying and mining, to wildlife monitoring. WingtraOne PPK offers an all-in-one solution: broad coverage, brilliant resolution and absolute accuracy down to 1 cm (0.4 in)
