Senior Autonomy Engineer, Data Curation

Skydio•San Mateo, CA

4d•$170,000 - $240,000

About The Position

As a Senior Engineer on the Autonomy Data Curation team, you’ll help build a data flywheel. You’ll collect the data that matters most from internal and external fleets of drones and turn it into high-quality, model-ready datasets that Autonomy teams can consume quickly and confidently for training and model development. Close peers will include the Deep Learning and Computer Vision teams. This role is an individual contributor who will report to the Director of Autonomy Data Curation.

Requirements

5+ years of professional software engineering experience (or equivalent), with significant ownership of production systems.
Strong proficiency in programming, demonstrable in at least one of of our most frequently used languages (Python/C++).
Hands-on experience building data pipelines for large-scale datasets (ETL/ELT, streaming or batch, orchestration).
Experience with data modeling, schema evolution, and dataset/version management.
Solid understanding of reliability engineering: monitoring, incident response, backfills, and operational rigor.
Ability to work across ambiguous interfaces (data + tooling + model consumers) and drive decisions.
Obtaining FAA Part 107 certification within the first 60 days of employment is strongly encouraged for all Skydio employees and required for certain positions.

Nice To Haves

Experience with autonomy/robotics data: flight logs, self-driving car data, sensor fusion traces, video, geospatial metadata.
Experience with labeling workflows, annotation tooling, and labeling QA at scale.
Familiarity with privacy concepts (PII handling, redaction, access control, audit logs).
Experience with vector/semantic search over media or telemetry.
Experience building hard-mining evaluation loops for ML models.

Responsibilities

Build and operate pipelines that transform raw autonomy logs & media into curated datasets with strong observability and clear ownership to make curated data more broadly reusable.
Build tooling that makes data discovery and slicing fast and self-serve for Autonomy teams. For example: media search tooling and hard mining loops with infra for auto-routing data to annotation.
Improve dataset quality and repeatability: versioning, provenance, and automated checks.
Apply privacy and security requirements in throughout our processes (access controls, retention, redaction/anonymization).
Build with a data-driven and impact-forward mindset with dashboards highlighting cost, dataset balance, and audit details.