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Salary: USD 180,000 - 250,000 / annual
Pyka is building autonomous electric aircraft for cargo transport and crop protection, with FAA regulatory approvals and operations across four continents. The company designs and manufactures a complete ecosystem including flight control software, avionics, motors, controllers, batteries, and composite airframes.
You will lead a team of engineers responsible for cloud infrastructure and tooling that supports Pyka's Dropship and Cargo programs. This is a hands-on management role where you own team and project roadmaps, define milestones and priorities, and guide infrastructure decisions across security, scalability, performance, and cost. You will hire, mentor, and coach engineers while contributing technically to architecture reviews, design guidance, and complex problem-solving.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading a team to deliver infrastructure and tooling projects end-to-end, from requirements through deployment and maintenance
- Owning team and project roadmaps, balancing company priorities with long-term infrastructure improvements
- Managing project execution, tracking progress, and adjusting as requirements evolve
- Owning infrastructure and practices for aircraft and engineering data management
- Guiding infrastructure decisions with attention to security, scalability, performance, and cost
- Hiring, onboarding, mentoring, and supporting engineers through regular feedback and coaching
- Contributing technically when needed to guide architecture, review designs, debug issues, or unblock work
The infrastructure you build supports critical software systems including path planning for long-range cargo missions, energy management on hybrid powertrains, flight controls for new airframes, sensor integration, and mission planning tools. You will work closely with hardware and operations teams to translate their needs into concrete engineering plans.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 6+ years of software engineering, cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, or related experience
- Prior experience managing engineers, including coaching, setting priorities, and supporting individual development
- Experience designing, deploying, and operating production systems on Google Cloud (Google Cloud Storage, BigQuery)
- Strong technical foundation in Python, Linux systems, networking, databases, and modern software development workflows
- Experience with infrastructure as code (e.g., Pulumi), CI/CD systems, containers, and deployment automation
- Familiarity with infrastructure supporting data analysis and machine learning workflows
- Experience improving system reliability through monitoring, incident response, and operational practices
- Experience with cloud security, access management, and cost management
- Strong technical judgment and ability to make practical tradeoffs between immediate needs and long-term maintainability
- Experience working across teams to turn ambiguous engineering and operational needs into concrete plans
- Comfort working in fast-moving, highly collaborative environments with evolving priorities
- Plus: experience supporting robotics, autonomous systems, or hardware-focused engineering teams
