7 months ago
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end autonomy stack across perception, state estimation, planning, and system behavior.
- Lead, manage, hire, onboard, and develop a team of autonomy engineers while owning team output, standards, morale, and retention.
- Define system architecture and technical direction while making reliability, performance, and operational-complexity tradeoffs.
- Remain hands-on in critical technical areas, including implementation, testing, integration, and flight debugging.
- Drive integration across autonomy, GNC, mission planning, and aircraft systems.
- Own autonomy validation across simulation, ground testing, and flight operations.
- Use flight data, telemetry, datasets, evaluation pipelines, and operational feedback to identify failures and improve deployed autonomy systems.
- Work with flight operations and hardware teams to improve reliability in real-world environments.
Requirements
- Experience building and deploying autonomy systems on real robotic or UAV platforms.
- Experience leading and developing engineers, including direct people management or a clear track toward it.
- Strong system-level understanding across perception, estimation, and planning, with depth in at least one area.
- Experience taking autonomy systems from development through operational deployment and iteration.
- Strong proficiency in C++ and Python.
- Experience debugging real-world autonomy failures using logs, telemetry, and system-level analysis.
- Experience working across software, hardware, and flight or field operations.
- Ability to make practical engineering tradeoffs under real operational constraints.
- Experience improving ML or perception systems using real-world operational data.
- Bonus qualifications include autonomous aircraft or aerial-systems experience, robotics, computer vision, motion planning, real-time or embedded systems, ROS2 or similar robotics frameworks, and deployment to resource-constrained environments.
About Skyways
Skyways designs, builds, and operates fully autonomous, long‑range VTOL cargo aircraft for logistics operators and defense customers. Founded in 2017 and based in Austin, Texas, the privately held company flies in controlled national airspace on three continents under FAA oversight and in support of U.S. military operations. Y Combinator–backed, it is moving from prototype programs to full‑rate production of large autonomous cargo fleets.