Senior Drone Engineer

About the role

You will join a drone technology company as a senior technical contributor who can own an aircraft program end to end. You set technical direction across disciplines, make the hard architecture calls, and mentor engineers who are earlier in their careers. The team looks to you when integration gets messy, schedules get tight, and tradeoffs have no clean answer, and your judgment is what keeps programs on the rails. You will also represent the engineering team in customer and partner discussions whenever deep technical credibility is needed to win new business or resolve difficult program issues.

What you will achieve

• Own the technical success of a UAS platform from concept through production, delivering aircraft that meet performance, cost, and schedule commitments.
• Resolve the toughest cross-disciplinary problems, such as controls-structure interaction, EMI-induced failures, and weight spirals, with data-driven decisions the team trusts.
• Raise the bar on engineering rigor by establishing design review standards, test plans, and documentation practices the whole organization adopts.
• Accelerate junior and mid-level engineers through mentorship, thorough design reviews, and pairing on the hardest technical problems.
• Build trusted relationships with suppliers and manufacturing partners, qualifying components and processes that scale reliably with production.

What you will bring

Must-haves

• 5-8 years of experience developing unmanned aircraft or complex robotic systems, with at least one product shipped to paying customers.
• Breadth across the UAS stack: you can speak fluently about airframes, avionics, flight controls, software, and RF, with real depth in at least two areas.
• Track record of leading technical workstreams or small teams through complete development cycles from concept to delivery.
• Strong flight test experience, including test planning, safety procedures, and data-driven iteration under schedule pressure.
• Experience making architecture tradeoffs under real constraints of weight, power, cost, and schedule, and defending them with analysis.
• Excellent technical communication: clear design documents, effective reviews, and explanations that non-specialists can follow.
• Bachelor's degree in engineering; advanced degree a plus.

Nice-to-haves

• Part 107 certification with significant logged flight hours across multiple platforms.
• Experience taking a product through regulatory certification or demanding customer qualification.
• Background in manufacturing scale-up from prototype to volume production.
• Familiarity with program management tools and earned-value style schedule tracking.