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Salary: USD 172,000 - 215,000 / annual
Skydio is seeking an experienced Solutions Engineering leader to build and manage the technical team supporting the State, Local, and Educational (SLED) Top 1200 segment—the band of agencies immediately below major federal accounts. This is where Skydio's "Drone as First Responder" motion transitions from bespoke, custom deployments to repeatable, scalable programs. The role is remote with approximately 30% travel required for customer engagements, field activities, deployments, team onsites, and company events.
You will report to the Director, Solutions Engineering – SLED and lead a national team that may eventually split into East and West regions. The SLED Solutions Engineering team is the technical arm of Skydio's state and local go-to-market motion, sitting between agencies and the product organization to turn operational problems into program designs, prove capability in the field, and ensure Skydio's products are used, integrated, and flown at scale.
Key responsibilities include:
**Lead the Team:** Hire, onboard, coach, and retain your team with clear territorial ownership and coverage. Set the bar for technical quality in demos, trial plans, site assessments, and customer-facing documentation. Own capacity allocation across your segment and make tradeoffs visible to leadership.
**Drive Technical Wins:** Own the technical win across the Top 1200 nationally, pairing Solutions Engineers to Key Account Leaders. Serve as the senior technical escalation point on critical pursuits, deployments, and customer issues. Partner with Sales leadership on pipeline, forecast, account planning, and the land-and-expand motion that grows first deployments into citywide programs.
**Own the Top 1200 Problem Set:** Systematize what works in major accounts into repeatable processes at volume—demo standards, site assessment quality, and trial design structured so the segment can split regionally without relearning the motion. Own site assessment quality as a performance measure; Solutions Engineers are the DRI for verifying dock locations before deployment. Hold the bar on proofs of concept as structured deployments tied to active opportunities with measurable operational value. Guide integration and airspace strategy including CAD, dispatch, video management, streaming platforms, BVLOS approvals, waivers, COAs, and docked operations. Maintain command of the public sector procurement path, including cooperative contracts, grant-funded programs, and public sector buying cycles.
**Represent the Customer Inside Skydio:** Be the aggregated voice of the customer to Product and Engineering, turning field observations into prioritized, defensible requirements. Build enablement content, reference architectures, and reusable technical assets that let the team scale. Maintain first-hand product knowledge through frequent hands-on use.
The team is measured on technical win rate, trial and proof-of-concept outcomes, program expansion, site assessment quality, and the requirements pushed into the product organization.
**Requirements:**
- 5+ years of relevant technical experience, including time in a customer-facing technical role (solutions engineering, field engineering, or applications engineering)
- 1+ years leading a technical team, formally or as a technical lead with hiring and mentorship responsibility; first-time managers with a demonstrated record of leading and developing people will be considered
- Strong understanding of drone technology, Public Safety sUAS operations, and regulatory compliance, including Drone as First Responder concepts of operation and dock-based remote operations
- Working knowledge of Public Safety technologies, including CAD, VMS, and related software platforms, and the ability to lead integration discussions
- Track record of hiring, onboarding, and developing technical people and retaining them
- Comfort operating inside a Sales organization, including owning a quota, deal strategy, and the judgment to know when to commit technical resources and when to decline
- Excellent written and verbal communication; ability to brief an operator, program manager, and senior executive without changing the facts
- Lead by example; willing to do whatever is needed to get a customer situation resolved
- Ability to travel approximately 30% of the time
- Ability to lift up to 60 lbs unaided
- FAA Part 107 certification within the first 60 days of employment is strongly encouraged and required for certain positions
**Nice to Have:**
- Prior public safety service as a sworn officer, firefighter, or agency UAS program lead
- Experience standing up a Drone as First Responder program from waiver through go-live, and with dock-based, remote, and BVLOS operations at scale
- Familiarity with grant funding pathways and cooperative purchasing vehicles used by state and local agencies
- Working knowledge of Salesforce, Palantir, Databricks, or equivalents
- Track record of building and scaling a technical team through a period of rapid growth
About Skydio
Defense / GovTech; Industrial — autonomous drones for defense, public safety, and enterprise.
