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Salary: USD 187,000 - 220,000 / annual
Skydio is seeking an experienced operations leader to join as Senior Manager, Solutions Engineering for Launch Team Readiness, East. This role leads the readiness function for the eastern half of Skydio's dock business—autonomous drone deployment operations for public safety, defense, and enterprise customers.
You will own the customer journey from pre-sales readiness (technical, policy, and operational) through deployment, training, and go-live. Success is measured on team outcomes: on-time deployments, smooth launches, and confident customers. You report to the Director, Launch Team and will manage a team of Readiness Specialists across your region.
Key responsibilities include:
**Lead the Team:** Hire, onboard, coach, and retain Readiness Specialists with clear regional ownership. Set quality standards for site readiness, launch checklists, training delivery, and handoff documentation. Own capacity and account assignment, balancing launch complexity against specialist experience.
**Drive On-Time Launches:** Maintain visibility into site readiness, policy milestones, deployment progress, and launch criteria across active accounts. Identify at-risk launches early and drive resolution. Directly own complex or recovering launches when warranted. Coordinate with your West region counterpart to run unified readiness operations. Partner with Sales and Solutions Engineering on capacity alignment and feasibility assessment.
**Own the Readiness Problem Set:** Develop and maintain the readiness playbook—launch checklists, site standards, policy templates, flight readiness criteria, and handoff documentation. Make readiness definitions legible to customers. Hold the line on readiness gates; deployment prerequisites are verified before dock shipment on every account. Identify patterns and systemic blockers, driving scalable fixes rather than one-off workarounds.
**Represent the Customer:** Be the aggregated voice of the customer to Product and Engineering. Escalate cross-team conflicts affecting launch timelines. Ensure clean post-launch handoffs to Customer Success with clear documentation. Maintain hands-on product knowledge through frequent use.
Travel of 50–60% is required to support customer engagements, field activities, deployments, team onsites, and company events, with heavier travel during team growth and onboarding.
**Requirements:**
- 5+ years of relevant experience in customer-facing operations, deployment, implementation, or project delivery, including work with public safety customers
- 1+ years leading a team, formally or as a lead with hiring and mentorship responsibility (first-time managers with demonstrated people leadership considered)
- Familiarity with Drone as First Responder concepts of operation and dock-based remote operations (professional experience strongly preferred)
- Demonstrated ability to manage complex, cross-functional initiatives with multiple stakeholders and competing priorities, and to build repeatable process in ambiguous environments
- Highly organized with strong attention to detail; comfortable managing timelines, dependencies, and readiness gates across a portfolio
- Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to brief operators, program managers, and senior executives without changing facts
- Lead by example; willing to do whatever is needed to resolve customer situations
- Ability to travel 50–60% of the time
- Ability to lift up to 60 lbs unaided
- FAA Part 107 certification within first 60 days of employment strongly encouraged and required for certain positions
**Nice to Have:**
- Prior public safety service or experience standing up a Drone as First Responder program on the agency side
- Experience supporting an agency through public approval processes (council/board authorization, public comment, privacy/data retention policy)
- Experience with dock-based, remote, and BVLOS operations at scale; site survey, RF/LTE assessment, network readiness for fixed installations
- Experience owning a customer onboarding or implementation function through rapid growth
- Working knowledge of Salesforce, Palantir, Databricks, or equivalents
About Skydio
Defense / GovTech; Industrial — autonomous drones for defense, public safety, and enterprise.
