About the role

Role overview

Head of Engineering (Founding Role) at AutoPylot. You’ll be engineer #1 as engineering is brought fully in-house, owning a production, revenue-generating platform at scale and taking it to the next level. You will work closely with the founder on product, architecture, and company direction, with meaningful equity.

What you’ll do

Own the full technical stack: backend, frontend, infrastructure, and mobile.
Build end-to-end product experiences for drone pilots, ensuring the app is fast, intuitive, and easy to use.
Craft frontend UI/UX that feels polished and effortless.
Design and maintain backend systems that are fast, reliable, and scalable.
Ship mobile updates used daily by real users.
Make architecture decisions and improve performance and usability.
Write code weekly and progressively take full ownership.
After ramp-up, start hiring a small, high-caliber engineering team.

Key milestones (within first year)

Own the full technical stack across web, backend, infrastructure, and mobile.
Ship product improvements that directly impact pilots’ daily user experience.
Set the platform up for 10x growth through major architectural choices.
Begin building and staffing a lean engineering team.

Current stack

TypeScript (Node.js)
AWS serverless: Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB
React + Ionic (mobile and web)
Mapbox (geospatial visualization)
Event-driven integrations with FAA systems

Requirements

7+ years building and shipping production software.
Deep experience with TypeScript (or strongly typed systems) across frontend and backend.
Strong product judgment: UI polish and user experience focus.
Proven experience designing and scaling cloud-native architectures.
Ability to own systems end-to-end (database design → APIs → user-facing screens).
Comfort operating where uptime and correctness are critical.
Builder mindset: ship directly; care about what users feel as much as underlying systems.

Nice to have

Experience building consumer-facing SaaS with strong UI/UX.
Experience with React, Ionic, or hybrid mobile/web applications.

About AutoPylot

AutoPylot is a venture-backed drone flight planning platform that processes FAA drone authorizations and helps pilots plan legally in minutes. Its consumer app also provides infrastructure-level services for airspace checks, weather briefings, and authorization flows, interfacing directly with FAA systems. The company serves hundreds of thousands of drone pilots monthly across the U.S.

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