Senior Engineering Manager - MFG SW

About the role:

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.

Customers choose Skydio because:

• We integrate advanced AI in drones for safer, effective autonomous flight with obstacle avoidance and predictive algorithms in complex settings.
• Our products are simple-to-use and reliable due to vertical integration. We build all parts of the software stack in-house, including embedded systems, middleware, autonomy, cloud infrastructure, manufacturing infrastructure, and automation.
• We are a U.S. company and manufacture our drones at our factory in California.

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).

If you have a passion for leading talented software engineers, are hands-on and thrive in complex hardware-software system projects, this role will be a great fit!

 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.

What makes you a good fit:

• 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.

You get excited by How It's Made or Factorio and want to get paid to work on the machine that builds the machines.

Work Location: This role would be 4-5 days a week in office out of our San Mateo and Hayward, California offices. We are quite flexible on the days but all employees would be expected to be able to commute to our office or would be open to relocation closer to the office.  We offer candidates relocation packages to help with this move.

Compensation: At Skydio, our compensation packages for full-time employees include competitive base salaries, equity in the form of options, comprehensive benefits, and various incentives and stipends. Compensation will vary based on factors, including skill level, proficiencies, transferable knowledge, and experience. Relocation assistance may also be provided for eligible roles. The annual base salary range for this position is $212,500 - 277,000*. Fundamentally, we believe that equity is the key to long-term financial growth, and we ensure all full-time employees have the opportunity to significantly benefit from the company’s success.

*Compensation for certain positions may vary based on the candidate's location.

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