Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform

📋 Description

• • Architect and own the end-to-end data platform that ingests, processes, and serves petabytes of telemetry from tens of thousands of Skydio drones operating around the globe. You will design fault-tolerant pipelines that handle real-time flight logs, sensor streams, and autonomy decision traces, ensuring sub-second latency for critical safety insights and offline batch processing for deep analytical workloads.
• • Lead the creation of a unified data lakehouse on Databricks and Palantir Foundry that becomes the single source of truth for every team at Skydio—from autonomy engineers refining AI models to customer success managers proving ROI for enterprise clients. You will define schemas, governance policies, and access patterns that balance security, compliance, and democratized exploration.
• • Build predictive models that anticipate hardware degradation—propeller micro-fractures, battery cell imbalance, gimbal wear—before failures occur in the field. Your models will trigger automated workflows that dispatch replacement parts, schedule preventive maintenance, and ultimately eliminate costly downtime for first responders and utility inspectors who depend on Skydio drones for life-saving missions.
• • Generate dynamic 3D connectivity maps that fuse drone telemetry with external RF and cellular datasets to visualize dead zones, interference patterns, and optimal flight corridors. These maps will be surfaced in Skydio’s ground control software, giving pilots real-time guidance on where they can safely operate and enabling network operators to prioritize infrastructure upgrades.
• • Create self-serve AI tools that let non-technical users explore data, spin up notebooks, and build ETL jobs without writing code. By embedding large-language-model assistants into the platform, you’ll empower product managers, field technicians, and executives to ask questions in plain English and receive charts, forecasts, and anomaly alerts in seconds.
• • Establish SLAs, monitoring, and alerting for every layer of the stack—from Kafka ingestion to Delta Lake optimization—so that the platform scales 10× with Skydio’s growth while keeping compute costs predictable. You’ll institute chaos testing and disaster-recovery drills to guarantee 99.9 % uptime for mission-critical workloads.
• • Partner with autonomy, hardware, and cloud-ops teams to co-design data contracts that ensure new firmware releases and sensor payloads are immediately observable. You’ll influence upstream engineering practices so that every byte generated by a drone is tagged, timestamped, and traceable for downstream analytics.
• • Champion a culture of data excellence by hosting internal tech talks, publishing architecture decision records, and mentoring junior engineers. Your thought leadership will make Skydio a destination for top data talent and a case study for how robotics companies can turn raw telemetry into competitive advantage.