Lead Drone Engineer

About the role

You will join a drone technology company to lead a small team of engineers building unmanned aircraft, owning both the technical output and the people doing the work. You split your time between architecture decisions, unblocking your team, and staying hands-on enough to earn their trust. The team's velocity and the aircraft's quality are both your responsibility, and you will be judged on both. You will shield the team from thrash by managing stakeholder requests, sequencing priorities clearly, and protecting the focused engineering time that complex hardware work requires.

What you will achieve

• Deliver a UAS development program on schedule by planning work carefully, managing dependencies across teams, and keeping everyone focused on what matters most.
• Grow each team member through regular coaching, clear and honest feedback, and stretch assignments matched to their development goals.
• Make sound architecture and prioritization calls under uncertainty, explaining your reasoning so the team commits fully even when the answer is debatable.
• Establish team rituals such as design reviews, test readiness reviews, and retrospectives that catch problems early and spread knowledge across the group.
• Keep quality high under schedule pressure by knowing when to insist on rigor and when to accept a well-understood calculated risk.

What you will bring

Must-haves

• 7-10+ years of experience developing UAVs or complex electromechanical systems, with shipped products in your history.
• Prior experience leading engineers directly or serving as a technical lead with real accountability for people and outcomes.
• Strong systems thinking across airframe, avionics, software, and flight test, with genuine depth in at least one domain.
• Proven ability to plan and execute engineering programs: milestones, resource allocation, dependency management, and risk tracking.
• Hands-on credibility: you can still debug a flight log, review a schematic, or join a flight test and add immediate value.
• Excellent communication and conflict-resolution skills within the team and across organizational boundaries.
• Bachelor's degree in engineering or a related field.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience hiring and building a team from scratch, including setting interview bars.
• Background in agile or hybrid development processes adapted to hardware realities.
• Part 107 certification and flight test leadership experience.
• Track record of shipping under aggressive timelines without burning out the team.