Applications Engineering Manager

SiFly; Çankaya; On-site; TRY 900,000 - 1,200,000; Full time

Job summary

SiFly Aviation is seeking an Applications Engineering Manager to lead the team that builds the software powering our aircraft. You will own delivery and people management for seven engineers (growing to eleven) across Turkey, coordinating with Santa Clara for hardware, flight-test, and manufacturing.

The role emphasizes delivery leadership over sole technical authority. The ideal candidate will drive predictable schedules, clear ownership, and a healthy engineering culture, ensuring

Qualifications

• Minimum 10+ years of software engineering experience with 5+ years in leadership or people management.
• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical/Computer Science or related field.
• Hands-on embedded Linux, robotics, real‑time systems, computer vision knowledge.
• Delivery ownership: turning backlog into a tracked, predictable plan.
• Experience managing senior engineers across time zones.

Responsibilities

• Own delivery of the on-aircraft applications portfolio with clear ownership and milestones.
• Grow and develop the team through coaching, feedback and career paths.
• Partner with the Applications architect to ensure architectural direction influences code.
• Coordinate with hardware, flight-test, manufacturing, cloud, and QA teams to surface dependencies early.
• Support release and flight-test cycles, triage field findings and drive fixes.
• Manage demand from customer demos and new product programs, balancing priorities.

Skills

Team leadership

Delivery ownership

People management

Cross-time-zone

Embedded Linux

AI awareness

Education

Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science

Tools

MAVLink

GStreamer

Camera/Video pipelines

Job description

We are looking for an Applications Engineering Manager to manage the team that builds the software our aircraft actually fly with. This is the team behind mission processing, camera and video pipelines, gimbal control, detect-and-avoid, and the on-aircraft services that connect the Q12 to our cloud and to the people operating it. You will own delivery and the people, working alongside an architect who owns technical direction — a deliberate split that lets both jobs be done properly as the team grows.

You will inherit a strong, senior group of engineers and a portfolio of roughly sixteen on-aircraft applications with real customer commitments against them. Your job is to turn that into a predictable delivery organization: clear ownership, visible schedules, no single points of failure, and engineers who are growing.

About SiFly Aviation

At SiFly, we’re building a new category of aircraft: vertical-takeoff, long-endurance drones that deliver helicopter-level performance at drone economics. After thousands of flight tests and years of engineering, our NDAA-compliant platform flies more than 2 hours in hover or 3 hours in forward flight on a single charge — matching the capability of traditional helicopters at a fraction of their cost and operational burden. We merge aerial robotics, perception, and onboard intelligence to cut complexity and minimize human intervention, and our unique approach to communications and networking unlocks remote operations from day one. It’s an ambitious mission, and we’re a small team that moves fast.

The role

You will manage a team of seven engineers growing toward eleven, spread across Turkey and working closely with our hardware, flight-test and manufacturing colleagues in Santa Clara. The team owns the on-aircraft application layer: gimbal and camera management, video streaming and recording, image and perception pipelines, electronic image stabilisation, detect-and-avoid, mission processing and MAVLink routing, and the Remote ID, ADS-B and GNSS RTK services.

The role is deliberately a delivery and people role rather than a technical-authority role. Architecture and hard technical calls sit with our Applications architect; you own how the work is planned, tracked, staffed and shipped, and you own the growth and wellbeing of the engineers doing it. In practice the two of you will be in constant conversation — the split is about focus, not distance.

You should expect to be technical enough to earn the team’s trust: to read the code, challenge an estimate, run a design review, and tell the difference between a hard problem and a stuck one. You will not be expected to be the deepest engineer in the room, and you should not want to be.

What you'll do

• Own delivery. Turn a portfolio of applications into a plan with owners, phases, target dates and checkpoints. Establish the cadence — planning, review, and honest status — that lets the wider company make commitments it can keep.
• Make ownership explicit and remove single points of failure. Every component gets a named owner and a named backup. Several of our applications currently rest on one engineer each; fixing that, through hiring and deliberate pairing, is one of your first mandates.
• Grow and develop the team. Run one-to-ones, set expectations, give direct and useful feedback, and build growth paths for senior engineers who want to go deeper technically as well as those who want to manage. Recruit and onboard the engineers joining over the coming months.
• Partner with the architect. Bring technical decisions to a clear owner and make sure decisions land in the code. Protect the team’s focus from churn while keeping architectural direction genuinely influential.
• Work across the organization. Coordinate daily with the embedded platform, cloud, QA, flight-test and hardware teams, and with our program management function, so dependencies surface early rather than at integration.
• Support the release and flight-test cycle. Make sure the team’s work reaches aircraft in a testable state, that field findings get triaged and fed back quickly, and that the path from a demo failure to a fix is short.
• Manage demand. Customer demos, pilots and new product programs all compete for the same engineers. You will be expected to make the trade-offs visible, push back where a commitment threatens a critical path, and propose a defensible alternative.
• Keep quality and engineering practice healthy. Code review, documentation, test coverage and technical-debt paydown are part of delivery, not a competing priority.

Required experience

• Minimum 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including at least 5 years leading or managing engineers — as an engineering team manager, or tech lead with people responsibility.
• A bachelor’s degree or higher in a related program — Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or similar.
• A hands-on engineering background in embedded Linux, robotics, real-time systems, computer vision, or a comparably technical domain — enough to read the code and hold a credible technical conversation with senior engineers.
• Demonstrated delivery ownership: you have taken a team’s work from an unclear backlog to a tracked, predictable plan, and you can describe how.
• Experience managing senior and principal engineers, including part-time or contract contributors, and coordinating across time zones.
• A track record of hiring, onboarding and developing engineers.
• Comfort with hardware-coupled development — schedules that depend on boards arriving, bring-up campaigns, and field testing.
• Expected to be heavy user of AI and to be aware of AI development workflows.
• Advanced English language skills and strong written and verbal communication — able to coordinate clearly across a distributed team in Turkey and Santa Clara.

Nice to have

UAV, aviation, automotive or robotics industry experience · MAVLink or comparable autopilot stack · camera, video or perception pipelines (GStreamer, V4L2, WebRTC, ISP tuning) · computer vision or machine-learning delivery · detect-and-avoid, autonomy or safety-relevant software · taking a product through EVT/DVT/PVT to production · working alongside a separate architect or staff-engineer track · Advanced command of English language.

What success looks like

• Every application in the portfolio has a named owner, a named backup, a phase and a target date — and those dates hold, or slip visibly and early rather than silently.
• The team ships to aircraft on a predictable cadence, and field findings reach the backlog within days.
• Engineers report that they know what is expected of them, that they are growing, and that they are unblocked.
• New hires reach productive ownership quickly rather than waiting on tribal knowledge.
• The architect spends their time on architecture, and you spend yours on delivery and people — with neither of you doing the other’s job by default.
• The wider company can plan against Applications commitments with confidence, including for customer demos and new product programs.

Details

• Job type: Remote contract-based employment.
• Location: On-site position in Ankara, Turkey — working closely with our Santa Clara team.
• Reports to: SVP, Software Engineering.