UAV Mission Operator — Lead Drone Swarm & Live Demos

Socket.dev; Paso Robles (CA); On-site; USD 85,000 - 155,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity stake

Premium medical, dental, vision plans

Relocation assistance

Unlimited AI tokens

Catered lunch daily

EV charging

Paid time off

Company holidays

Job summary

Scout AI is seeking a UAV Mission Operator to lead the drone side of our Mission Operations team, Swarm Forge—a mission commander directing a swarm of drones to search, identify, and strike with minimal human input.

You’ll lead the drone operator team, own the flight test pipeline, and run live customer demonstrations to ensure systems are prepared for both internal testing and external deployment.

Qualifications

• Hands-on UAS/drone operations experience
• 3+ years of experience operating, maintaining, or testing unmanned aerial systems (UAS) or similar platforms
• Demonstrated team leadership
• Comfortable working directly with engineers daily — triaging bugs and validating builds
• Able to co-own product development with a technical peer
• Experience running live demonstrations or training sessions for military or customer stakeholders
• Strong organizational skills to build schedules and readiness trackers

Responsibilities

• Lead and schedule the drone operator team day to day
• Partner with the Flight Test Engineer to drive product development and test priorities
• Own execution of Development Test Requests and flight test plans across the fleet
• Validate new software, model, and orchestrator releases in flight and catch regressions
• Plan and run customer- and investor-facing drone demonstrations
• Own customer training and support for Scout’s drone systems
• Track fleet readiness and maintenance across the UAS fleet
• Coordinate airspace deconfliction and hold safety line on every flight operation
• Provide feedback on flight behavior, hardware issues, and software bugs to engineering

Skills

UAS operations

Team leadership

Drone testing

Flight test coordination

Engineering feedback

Customer demonstrations

Safety procedures

Job description

Scout AI is seeking a UAV Mission Operator to lead the drone side of our Mission Operations team, Swarm Forge—a mission commander directing a swarm of drones to search, identify, and strike with minimal human input.

You’ll lead the drone operator team, own the flight test pipeline, and run live customer demonstrations to ensure systems are prepared for both internal testing and external deployment.