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Skydio is seeking a Head of Manufacturing Engineering to lead the development and scale-up of manufacturing systems for high-volume autonomous drone production. This is a hands-on leadership role responsible for building and directing a multidisciplinary manufacturing engineering organization spanning automation, controls, equipment engineering, process development, and production industrialization.
You will own the manufacturing engineering strategy and technical roadmap, translating product designs into robust, automated, production-ready systems capable of reliable high-volume operation. Key responsibilities include establishing manufacturing standards, designing and deploying automated production equipment, building internal controls and automation capabilities, and developing data-driven manufacturing environments.
The role requires close partnership with Design Engineering, Operations, Quality, Supply Chain, Test Engineering, and Product teams to ensure products are designed for manufacturability and scale. You will lead the architecture and lifecycle management of automated manufacturing equipment, establish controls and automation standards for rapid deployment and scaling, and develop strategies for balancing manual, semi-automated, and fully automated manufacturing based on production economics and maturity.
A major focus is building a highly instrumented manufacturing environment where equipment and processes generate actionable production data. You will partner with software and data teams to connect manufacturing equipment with MES, traceability, quality, and factory data systems, using manufacturing data to identify process drift, predict failures, improve yield, and accelerate root-cause analysis.
The ideal candidate has 12+ years in manufacturing, automation, or controls engineering, with 5+ years leading engineering organizations responsible for manufacturing systems or factory automation. You should have demonstrated experience scaling complex electromechanical products into high-volume production, preferably in aerospace, automotive, robotics, or industrial automation. Deep expertise in PLC architectures, robotics, servo and motion-control systems, machine vision, industrial networking, sensors, automated test and inspection, and machine safety systems is essential. Experience developing custom production equipment from concept through deployment, managing significant CapEx programs, and operating in environments requiring rigorous configuration management and quality systems is required. You must have strong DFM/DFA understanding, proven ability to recruit and lead multidisciplinary technical teams, and the analytical skills to move between factory-level strategy and detailed engineering problems.
About Skydio
Defense / GovTech; Industrial — autonomous drones for defense, public safety, and enterprise.
