Staff Full-stack Software Engineer

Skydio•San Mateo, CA

14d•$200,000 - $275,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Skydio is the leading US drone company and the world leader in autonomous flight, the key technology for the future of drones and aerial mobility. The Skydio team combines deep expertise in artificial intelligence, best-in-class hardware and software product development, operational excellence, and customer obsession to empower a broader, more diverse audience of drone users, from utility inspectors to first responders, soldiers in battlefield scenarios and beyond. Skydio’s mission is to make the world a safer and more efficient place through the use of autonomous drones. Our customers—from public safety agencies to industrial and enterprise operators—deploy fleets ranging from a single drone to tens of thousands of drones and docking stations to support critical missions such as infrastructure inspection, emergency response, search and rescue, and large-scale mapping. As a Staff Software Engineer on Skydio’s Fleet Management or Inspection & Mapping teams, you will design and build the core cloud systems that power autonomous drone operations at scale. Your work will enable customers to plan complex aerial missions, manage and monitor large fleets, visualize rich spatial data, and seamlessly integrate drone operations into their workflows. This is a true full-stack role, combining backend systems in Python and Go with TypeScript and React on the frontend. You will collaborate closely with Autonomy, Backend Infrastructure, Product, Design, and Field teams, owning technical direction and features end-to-end while helping shape Skydio’s long-term platform architecture.

Requirements

8+ years of experience building full-stack software systems, with strong proficiency in TypeScript, React, GraphQL, Python, and cloud platforms such as AWS.
Demonstrated systems thinking: the ability to design end-to-end solutions with performance, reliability, testing, and observability in mind.
Experience building secure, scalable, enterprise-grade cloud applications and APIs.
Familiarity with modern infrastructure and tooling such as PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Temporal, or similar technologies.
Strong product instincts and the ability to take ambiguous problems and turn them into reliable, customer-facing solutions.

Nice To Haves

Experience with geospatial data, mapping, or visualization tools such as Mapbox, Cesium, PostGIS, ArcGIS, or QGIS.
Experience with photogrammetry, scanning, mapping, or 3D reconstruction pipelines.
Experience integrating frontend applications with cloud-based services and real-time data systems.
Familiarity with autonomy, robotics, or mission-planning architectures (e.g., state machines, behavior trees).

Responsibilities

Design and evolve Skydio Cloud’s core data models, APIs, and services for drones, docks, users, missions, and the large volumes of telemetry, video, and geospatial data they produce.
Build and maintain core fleet management capabilities, including real-time fleet health, over-the-air updates, asset and media management, security and permissions, user and device management, and fleet-scale observability.
Develop geospatial and mission-planning systems that allow customers to plan advanced aerial missions, visualize complex spatial datasets, and operate drones autonomously and safely.
Design secure, scalable, and highly observable systems capable of handling petabytes of real-time data and video from globally distributed drone fleets.
Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Design, Backend Infrastructure, and Field teams to rapidly iterate, incorporate customer feedback, and deliver impactful features.
Provide technical leadership through architecture reviews, code reviews, and proof-of-concepts, helping raise the bar for engineering quality across the organization.
Participate in a rotating on-call schedule to help ensure Skydio’s platform remains reliable and available 24/7. While reliability is critical, incidents are rare.