Head of Engineering (Founding Role)

The Short Version

AutoPylot is one of the largest and highest-rated drone flight planning platforms in the United States, processing a significant share of FAA drone authorizations. Hundreds of thousands of drone pilots use our app every month to plan flights, check airspace, get weather briefings, and launch legally in minutes. Our platform interfaces directly with FAA systems, and pilots choose us because the product is fast, intuitive, and easy to use.

We're venture-backed, revenue-generating, and growing. Now we're bringing engineering fully in-house and looking for the person who will own it.

This is a founding engineering role. You'll be engineer #1 on the in-house team, inheriting a production platform that's already at scale and taking it to the next level. You'll work directly with the founder on product, architecture, and company direction. You'll have meaningful equity because this is a meaningful role.

If you're the kind of engineer who wants to build the infrastructure layer for commercial drone operations in the U.S., and you care as much about what users see and feel as you do about what's running underneath, keep reading.

What You'll Actually Be Doing

AutoPylot is a consumer product as much as it is an infrastructure product. Pilots open our app before every flight. The experience they have in those moments, how quickly they can check airspace, how clearly weather data is presented, how seamlessly authorization flows work, is what keeps them coming back and paying for a subscription. You'll own all of it.

That means you'll be building across the full stack: crafting frontend experiences that feel polished and effortless, designing backend systems that are fast and reliable, and shipping mobile updates that real users depend on daily. You'll write code every week, make architecture decisions, improve performance and usability, and eventually hire engineers to build the team around you.

Day one, you'll have a production system with real users, real revenue, and a dev shop on retainer handling maintenance while you ramp up. Your job is to learn the system, start shipping, and progressively take full ownership.

Within the first year, you'll:

• Own the full technical stack: backend, frontend, infrastructure, and mobile.
• Ship product improvements that directly impact the user experience, pilots have every day.
• Make the architecture decisions that set the platform up for 10x growth.
• Begin building a small, high-caliber engineering team.

The stack today:

TypeScript (Node.js), serverless AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB), React \+ Ionic for mobile and web, Mapbox for geospatial visualization, and event-driven integrations with FAA systems. You'll have the authority to evolve it.

Who is this for?

This role is about mentality more than resume lines.

You might be a senior or staff engineer at a startup who's been waiting for the chance to own everything. Or a CTO at a small company who still writes code every day. Or an early engineer who rode a platform through real growth and wants to do it again with more ownership.

What matters is that you're a builder who ships, not a manager who delegates. You care about the user experience, not just the system architecture. You notice when a loading state feels janky, when a flow has one too many steps, or when a map interaction isn't quite right. And you fix it.

You should have:

• 7\+ years building and shipping production software
• Deep experience with TypeScript or strongly typed systems across frontend and backend
• A strong eye for product quality, UI polish, and user experience
• Real experience designing and scaling cloud native architectures
• The ability to own a system end-to-end, from database design to API to the screen a user touches
• Comfort working in environments where uptime and correctness aren't optional

It's a plus if you have:

• Experience building consumer-facing SaaS products with strong UI/UX standards
• Experience with React, Ionic, or mobile/web hybrid applications
• Familiarity with regulated or compliance-sensitive systems
• Experience scaling a SaaS platform through a growth phase
• Experience hiring or mentoring engineers

You do not need drone or aviation experience, but it is preferred.

Why is this role rare

?

Most "Head of Engineering" postings are mid-stage companies looking for a process manager. This isn't that.

AutoPylot is at an inflection point where engineering ownership directly shapes the company's trajectory. You won't be inheriting someone else's org chart and optimizing it. You'll be building the engineering function from scratch on top of a platform that already works and already has customers.

What also makes this different is that you'll own the product experience, not just the plumbing.

AutoPylot's competitive advantage is that it's the easiest, fastest, most intuitive way for a drone pilot to get in the air legally. Maintaining and extending that experience is core to the role.

You'll have a direct line to the founder, real equity, and the kind of technical authority that disappears once a company gets to 50 people.

Compensation

• Base salary:

$125K to $185K, depending on experience

• Equity:

Meaningful founder-level equity, structured for real ownership, not a token grant

• Location:

Fully remote, U.S. only (FAA regulatory requirements). East Coast time zone overlap is a plus, but not required.

• Structure:

Open to W2 or contract to hire