Senior Engineering Manager, Skydio
Manufacturing Software
$212.5-277k
+ equity
More information about location
4-5 days a week in office (San Mateo, CA, and Hayward, CA)
Autonomous drones for DFR, inspection, and national security
Job no longer available
Autonomous drones for DFR, inspection, and national security
501-1000 employees
Job no longer available
$212.5-277k
+ equity
More information about location
4-5 days a week in office (San Mateo, CA, and Hayward, CA)
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To make the world more productive, creative, and safe with autonomous flight.
Role
Who you are
- You enjoy managing small, high performing teams that have high impact
- You are comfortable working in a very cross functional environment with multiple stakeholders and dependencies
- You can bring clarity to ambiguous situations, build consensus, prioritize and execute with efficiency
- You have excellent communication and project management skills
- You are excited about architecting an infrastructure system that can scale to multiple geographic locations and large volume production
- You love having fun building great products and enjoy working on systems that involve both hardware and software (8-12 years of experience preferred)
- You are very comfortable with Python or C++ or Java (so similar OOP languages) and have strong coding and problem solving fundamentals
What the job involves
- At Skydio, our mission is to make the world more productive, creative, and safe with autonomous flight. We have a deep belief in the transformative power of drones, and our enterprise focus is already making an impact in a wide range of industries across the world
- In leading this software infrastructure team, you’ll be at the center of Skydio’s efforts to scale manufacturing, where drones and the factories that build them are complex, collaborative systems
- Our software tracks the history of every part, enabling efficient testing, validation, and quality assurance for every product we ship
- To meet global customer demand, we need to level-up our software architecture to handle more product lines, more factories, bigger teams of contributors, and integration with external partners, all while keeping quality extremely high
- The core team consists of high performing software engineers working in a cross-functional environment
- Projects sit at the intersection of backend (Python + Flask), embedded software (C++/C), frontend (React + Typescript), and electrical engineering (Robotics and Hardware Fixtures)
- Our tech: Python + Flask backend + on-machine, Protobufs for IPC and RPC, React + Typescript frontend, On-premises containerized Linux client machines and servers, Terraform + AWS backend cloud, Hardware-In-the-Loop build validation systems, Internally developed framework for manufacturing and testing operations
- Team Project Examples:
- Build and maintain a Hardware-In-the-Loop system for continuous testing of the hardware and software components of our drones and build systems
- Design a deployment system for sending code physical machines all over the globe, inside of challenging and hostile networks, with redundant safety systems
- Build a visual configuration tool for documenting and changing how mass production processes work and change on the fly
- Develop our robot calibration process that can distinguish between hardware and software failures and suggest next steps for assembly rework
- Create a dashboard that visualizes the state of the factory to help engineers debug faster
- Develop an automated fixture that assesses drone sensors and actuators to minimize operator interaction
- How you'll make an impact:
- Architect our next-generation production systems, from front to back end to infrastructure, enabling us to reliably scale across multiple factories and contract manufacturer sites
- Design secure, efficient, observable, and robust software for dealing with real-time and historical data generated by the factory, empowering other teams to investigate yield issues and make decisions
- Keep the factory running smoothly by establishing processes and tooling that help test authors write predictable and maintainable code
- Look at a process and ask, "How can this be eliminated or made faster, more reliable, scalable, and less human-dependent?" - and then make that happen
- Adding best practices / style guides for how to write the low level APIs & tests to best utilize our framework
Our take
A leader in autonomous flight, Skydio builds drones that can track and film targets while avoiding obstacles. Its products have a wide range of applications, most notably for businesses that need to undertake inspections in unsafe places. The drones are also valuable to search and rescue efforts, police forces, and the US army.
Backed by a range of top investors and strategic partners (including Andreesen Horowitz, Levitate Capital, and Next 47) Skydio sets itself apart from its competitors by marketing its products predominantly to businesses. With technology such as 3D scanning and a 360-degree superzoom mode, its drones have a wide range of applications and functionality.
The company raised funding in 2023, which has boosted its valuation to over $2B. It has since focussed on R&D, developing and launching the X10 model which is designed for first responders and the military, as well as enhancing its remote control and thermal imaging capabilities. On top of this it's also been awarded two contracts to expand the use of advanced autonomous drones across key operational units by the US Air Force. As the largest American drone company, there is no reason Skydio shouldn't remain a key industry actor for years to come.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
24% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Nov 2024
$170m
SERIES E
Feb 2023
$230m
SERIES E
Total funding: $741m
Company HQ
Western Hills, San Mateo, CA
Leadership
Adam Bry
(Co-Founder & CEO)Having studied at MIT, they spent a year and a half at Google as a Software Engineer. They left this position in February 2014 to co-found Skydio.
Abraham Bachrach
(Co-FOunder & CTO)Earned a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and was a Software Engineer for Google's Project Wing.
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