SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 210,000 - 275,000 / annual
Skydio is seeking an experienced Solutions Engineering leader to build and run the Utilities Solutions Engineering team. Utilities is Skydio's most mature commercial vertical, and this team serves as the technical authority behind every utility engagement—running technical discovery, designing solutions, executing dock trials, and carrying customers through deployment and expansion.
You will lead a team of Utilities Solutions Engineers, setting standards for technical discovery and solution design across T&D inspection, substation inspection, storm and outage restoration, vegetation management, hydro and dam inspection, and water and wastewater assets. You'll own team productivity, engagement, and growth, managing capacity across the segment and making tradeoffs visible to Sales leadership. You'll develop people beyond their current roles, including career paths, promotion cases, and succession planning.
On the technical side, you'll own technical win rate for the utilities vertical and partner with Utilities sales leadership on quota attainment and pipeline health. You'll govern the paid dock trial and rental motion for utility customers—scoping, success criteria, execution, and conversion to closed-won. You'll serve as the senior technical escalation point on critical pursuits, deployments, and customer issues, and represent Skydio at utility industry events, customer summits, and executive briefings.
You'll maintain team fluency in utility inspection payloads and data workflows (thermography, LiDAR acquisition and processing, photogrammetry, and survey-grade accuracy requirements). You'll guide integration strategy with systems customers already run—ESRI and GIS, DroneDeploy, REST-based APIs, and customer data lake patterns. You'll maintain command of the regulatory and procurement environment for regulated utilities, including PUC approval cycles, capital planning, and BVLOS waiver pathways.
You'll also represent the customer inside Skydio by directing the team's product feedback into the Inspection and Mapping and Cloud product teams, ensuring PRDs and gap submissions are specific, prioritized, and tied to revenue. You'll build and maintain scalable technical assets—reference architectures, demo scripts, workflow documentation, and playbooks—that reduce time-to-productivity for new Solutions Engineers. You'll maintain first-hand product knowledge through frequent hands-on use.
This is a remote role with up to 50% travel required to support customer engagements, team field activities, trials, and company events. The role reports to the Director, Solutions Engineering – Commercial.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Prior experience as a Solutions Engineer, Solutions Architect, or equivalent technical pre-sales role serving electric or water utilities
- Direct utility industry experience (utility UAS program leadership, line work, distribution operations, or asset management) strongly preferred
- Working knowledge of utility inspection payloads and data workflows: thermography, LiDAR acquisition and processing, photogrammetry, and survey-grade accuracy requirements
- Familiarity with GIS and enterprise integrations—ESRI, DroneDeploy, REST-based APIs, and customer data lake patterns
- Understanding of the regulatory and procurement environment for regulated utilities, including PUC approval cycles, capital planning, and BVLOS waiver pathways
- Excellent written and verbal communication, with ability to move between a lineman, a GIS analyst, and a VP of Operations in the same day
- Demonstrated people leadership: hiring, coaching, performance management, and building team process from a blank page. First-time managers with strong technical leadership track records will be considered
- Lead by example; willing to do whatever is needed to get a customer situation resolved
- FAA Part 107 Certificate, or ability to obtain one within 60 days of hire
- Ability to travel up to 50% to support customer engagements, team field activities, and company events
- Ability to lift up to 60 lbs unaided
NICE TO HAVE:
- Prior utility UAS program ownership on the customer side
- Experience with condition-based maintenance programs and asset health analytics
- Experience with dock-based, remote, and BVLOS operations at scale
- Familiarity with NERC, FERC, or state PUC reporting obligations
- Working knowledge of Salesforce, Jira, Databricks, or equivalents
- Track record of building and scaling a technical team through rapid growth
About Skydio
Defense / GovTech; Industrial — autonomous drones for defense, public safety, and enterprise.
