Rigby spent six months as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona before being appointed a Carnegie Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories. In 2010, Rigby was appointed deputy operations project scientist at the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and civil servant at Goddard Space Flight Center. She was made project scientist for operations in 2018. She delivered a TED talk on space telescopes in 2011. In June 2023, she was chosen as the senior project scientist for the JWST, succeeding John C. Mather.