Software Engineer, Operations

Voltair; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity options

Job summary

Voltair, makers of autonomous drones for earth observation, is seeking a Software Engineer, Operations in San Francisco. The role focuses on building the software stack to operate a distributed drone network, with responsibilities spanning data pipelines, tooling, and platform integration.

The ideal candidate has at least 1 year of experience and works across frontend and backend layers using Node.js, React, and related technologies.

Qualifications

• 1+ year of software development experience.
• Full stack engineering capability.
• Willingness to travel ~1wk per 2 months.

Skills

Node.js

PostgreSQL

React

Docker

Next.js

Job description

Voltair

Autonomous Drones for Earth Observation

Software Engineer, Operations

$120K - $180K

0.50% - 1.50%

San Francisco, CA, US

Job type Full-time

Role Engineering, Frontend

Experience 1+ years

Visa US citizen/visa only

Skills Node.js, PostgreSQL, React, Docker, Next.js

About the role

About Voltair

Voltair is building the world's first distributed network of drones for earth observation. We envision a world where after a major storm, an operator of critical infrastructure can simply sign into our platform and dispatch a drone. Within minutes, our autonomous fixed wing UAV will identify high risk hazards and stream issues directly to crews on the ground. With our ground stations and long range platform, we can cover the continental U.S. with only about 5000 drones.

We operate as a full stack service, meaning we build our drones, deploy them, capture data, analyze it, and deliver the results on our software platform. We've serviced multiple power utilities already, and are preparing for our biggest deployment with a large multinational power utility later this year.

The Technical Problem

Flight planning is hard. To teleoperate legally (and eventually autonomously), we must operate within the waivers we have with the FAA, which requires us quantify population density and road traffic along our flight path. It is critical to optimize flight plans and maximize utilization of good weather flight hours per drone. Vegetation and snow can obscure imagery, and hours of sunlight and precipitation can ground operations. To deliver high quality data, we must vary our flight path depending on data capture type, ex: LiDAR mapping vs thermal inspection. Structures and terrain variability compounds complexity. Flight planning drives the sales / quoting process, so a subset of our internal tooling will be exposed to our customers to drive sales.

Additional Areas of Focus

You’d be joining a small team tackling many disparate problems. We're looking for someone excited to build any and all tools required to operate a global drone operation. Some product areas include:

• Cloud data pipelines
• Customer data delivery platform features
• Internal AI agents
• Communications with home owners
• Mobilization logistics
• Pilot / vendor management / payment

Ideal Characteristics
Voltair is looking to hire an exception software engineer with the following characteristics:

• 1+ year of experience
• Exception full stack engineer
• Low ego
• Comfortable with occasional travel (~1wk per 2 months)

About Voltair

We build drones with unlimited range (by recharging on power lines). The grid is the world's largest machine. Thus, we can collect data anywhere, anytime. We're selling a full-stack inspection service to power utilities by delivering reports with annotated photos of equipment that is broken or at risk. Our mission is to find faults and other maintenance concerns before they spark wildfires. Today power utilities are our customer, but tomorrow they'll be our deployment partner. At scale we are a new infrastructure layer for data on the physical world.