Angel Aerial Systems - VP of Engineering

About Angel Aerial Systems:

Angel Aerial Systems designs and manufactures long-endurance unmanned aircraft for public safety, search and rescue, defense, and other critical missions.

Our first product, the Trio Scout, can hover for up to 100 minutes while carrying thermal and long-range optical imaging systems. That is approximately three to four times the endurance of conventional multirotor drones of similar size and capability.

Angel develops the complete system to deliver a monolithic product and customer experience. This includes the airframe, gimbal, avionics, batteries, communications, embedded software, flight controls, ground-control software, ground controllers, and chargers. We own the architecture, engineering, integration, software, and production of the complete platform rather than building on someone else’s drone.

The Role

Angel is seeking a Vice President of Engineering to lead the development, production, reliability, and continuous improvement of our products.

This person will lead a multidisciplinary hardware and software team responsible for building high-quality, mission-ready systems while improving them rapidly enough to maintain a technical lead in an aggressive industry. Quality and speed are not opposing goals. We need a leader who can establish the technical discipline required to achieve both.

Experience developing equipment that simply shuts down safely when something goes wrong is not sufficient. We need someone who understands systems where hardware or software failures can affect human safety, critical missions, infrastructure, or expensive equipment.

The ideal candidate has developed integrated hardware and software products in a startup or similarly fast-moving environment where failures have serious real-world consequences. Relevant backgrounds may include SpaceX, Tesla, Waymo, or comparable aerospace, autonomous-vehicle, defense, or robotics companies.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a multidisciplinary engineering organization.
• Lead engineering across the aircraft, avionics, full software stack, communications, ground controllers, chargers, manufacturing, test, quality, and reliability.
• Own major technical decisions, product failures, and design tradeoffs.
• Improve product quality, reliability, performance, manufacturability, cost, and ease of use.
• Extend Angel’s technical advantages in flight endurance, payload capability, aircraft performance, reliability, and ease of use.
• Establish clear technical ownership, requirements, priorities, schedules, and accountability.
• Build disciplined processes for design reviews, validation, configuration control, engineering changes, root-cause analysis, and corrective action.
• Ensure hardware, software, manufacturing, and quality operate as one integrated organization rather than separate silos.
• Convert field failures, customer feedback, test results, and competitive developments into prioritized product improvements.
• Move improvements from prototype through validation and into repeatable production at exceptional speed without sacrificing quality.

Qualifications

• At least 10 years of experience developing industry-leading products that combine hardware and software, with substantial engineering leadership responsibility.
• Experience leading engineering teams in a startup.
• A record of shipping physical products where failures have significant safety, operational, financial, or mission consequences.
• Experience taking products from development through testing, production, deployment, and continued field improvement.
• Strong knowledge of systems engineering, reliability, validation, configuration management, and root-cause analysis.
• Experience leading multidisciplinary teams across mechanical, electrical, software, embedded systems, controls, manufacturing, quality, and test.
• Demonstrated ability to improve products quickly without sacrificing quality or production stability.
• Strong technical judgment and a willingness to work directly with the product, engineers, manufacturing team, and customers.
• Bachelors \& Masters degree in engineering. PhD is preferred.