Mission Operator - UAV

Scout AI•Paso Robles, CA

About The Position

The future of defense will be decided by those who field intelligent machines at scale. At Scout AI, we’re developing Fury, the first robotic foundation model for defense, to give U.S. forces overwhelming, adaptable, and autonomous power across every domain. Fury enables human operators to command fleets of robots through natural language, and empowers those machines to sense, decide, and act together as one. This mission will ask everything of us: urgency, precision, and relentless work. The Role We're hiring a UAV Mission Operator to lead the drone side of our Mission Operations team, Swarm Forge: our AI mission commander, directing a swarm of smaller drones to search, identify, and strike with minimal human input. You'll lead the drone operator team, own the flight test pipeline, and run the live customer demonstrations to ensure systems are prepared for both internal testing and external deployment. You'll work in close partnership with our Flight Test Engineer: the Flight Test Engineer owns the technical depth of test design and instrumentation, and you own execution, the team, and everything customer-facing. Together you decide what gets tested, in what order, and what engineering hears back.

Requirements

Hands-on UAS/drone operations experience — piloting, mission planning, or direct oversight of drone operations
3+ years of experience operating, maintaining, or testing unmanned aerial systems (UAS), drones, or similar platforms
Demonstrated team leadership, not just individual flying or engineering
Comfortable working directly with engineers daily — triaging bugs, validating builds, giving feedback specific enough to act on
Able to co-own product development with a technical peer
Experience running live demonstrations or training sessions for military or customer stakeholders
Strong organizational skills — able to build a schedule, a readiness tracker, and a team rhythm where none exists yet
Working knowledge of drone safety procedures, airspace coordination, and incident reporting
Must be a U.S. Person due to required access to U.S. export controlled information or facilities
Passion about defense of the United States and its allies
May be expected to obtain and hold a U.S. Top Secret security clearance

Responsibilities

Lead and schedule the drone operator team day to day
Partner with the Flight Test Engineer to drive product development on the air platform — shaping test priorities, splitting execution, and turning results into engineering asks
Own execution of Development Test Requests and flight test plans across the Ax4, Archer, and Neros fleet, working directly with engineering on results and next steps
Validate new software, model, and orchestrator releases in flight, and catch regressions before they reach a customer or a demo
Plan and run customer- and investor-facing drone demonstrations, including live-fly events and vendor days
Own customer training and support, including training Army and customer personnel on Scout's drone systems
Track fleet readiness and maintenance across the UAS fleet
Coordinate airspace deconfliction and hold the safety line on every flight operation
Feed structured feedback on flight behavior, hardware issues, and software bugs back to engineering daily