Senior Autonomy Engineer (Data Curation)

Role Overview

Join Skydio as a Senior Autonomy Engineer (Data Curation). You’ll build and run a data flywheel for autonomy by collecting, curating, and transforming high-quality datasets from internal and external drone fleets so Autonomy teams can train and improve models.

This is an individual contributor role reporting to the Director of Autonomy Data Curation.

Key Responsibilities

• Collect & curate model-ready datasets from internal/external drone fleets for training and model development.
• Build and operate data transformation pipelines that convert raw autonomy logs and media into curated datasets with:
  • strong observability
  • clear dataset ownership
• Improve dataset quality & repeatability through tooling and operational best practices.
• Develop tools that enable fast, self-serve data discovery and slicing for Autonomy teams.
• Apply privacy and security requirements across the data pipeline and dataset lifecycle.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Hands-on experience building data pipelines for large-scale datasets (ETL/ELT; streaming or batch; orchestration).
• Strong programming proficiency in Python and/or C++.
• Reliability engineering knowledge: monitoring, incident response, backfills, and operational rigor.
• Ability to work across ambiguous interfaces between data, tooling, and model consumers.

Nice-to-Haves / Strong Preference

• Data modeling, schema evolution, and dataset/version management.
• Experience with autonomy/robotics data: flight logs, sensor fusion traces, video, and geospatial metadata.
• Experience with labeling workflows and labeling QA at scale.
• Familiarity with privacy concepts: PII handling, redaction, access control, audit logs.
• Experience with vector/semantic search over media or telemetry.
• Experience building hard-mining evaluation loops for ML models.