Senior Manager, Solutions Engineering for Launch Team Readiness, East

Skydio, the leading US drone company and world leader in autonomous flight, is seeking an experienced operations leader to join their team as Senior Manager, Solutions Engineering for Launch Team Readiness, East. This role leads the readiness function for the eastern half of the dock business, overseeing the customer journey from pre-sales readiness—technical, policy, and operational—to deployment, training, and go-live. Success is measured by the team’s outcomes: on-time deployments, smooth launches, and confident customers.

The role is remote, with 50 to 60% travel required to support customer engagements, field activities, deployments, team onsites, and company events. Travel demands may increase during periods of team growth and onboarding.

This position reports to the Director, Launch Team.

About the Team:

The Launch Team is the operational arm of Skydio’s dock business, bridging the gap between opportunities and running programs. Readiness ensures agencies have everything needed for a launch: site readiness, policy and public approval, flight operations, and a clean handoff to Customer Success. The team is measured on time-to-launch, readiness gate adherence, deployment schedule performance, and program condition at handoff. Readiness capacity scales faster than headcount, requiring agility and efficiency.

Readiness Specialists collaborate closely with Solutions Engineers, Deployment Engineering, Legal and Policy, and Customer Success to support successful deployments and the long-term success of Public Safety sUAS programs.

How You’ll Make an Impact:

Lead the team

• Hire, onboard, coach, and retain a team of Readiness Specialists, ensuring clear ownership and coverage across accounts in the region. Develop team members beyond their current roles.
• Set readiness quality standards, including site readiness standards, launch checklists, training delivery, and handoff documentation that meet the expectations of chiefs, sheriffs, or city councils.
• Own capacity and account assignment across the region, balancing launch complexity against specialist experience, and make tradeoffs visible to leadership.

Drive on-time launches

• Monitor the health of the readiness portfolio across the East region, with visibility into site readiness, policy and approval milestones, deployment and training progress, and launch criteria for every active account.
• Identify at-risk launches early and drive resolution, escalating when blockers exceed the team’s authority. Directly own complex, strategic, or recovering launches when necessary.
• Collaborate closely with the West counterpart to ensure both halves of the readiness function operate as one cohesive unit.
• Partner with Sales and Solutions Engineering leadership to align readiness capacity with pipeline, and advise on site feasibility and launch requirements for strategic pursuits.

Own the readiness problem set

• Develop and maintain the readiness playbook, including launch checklists, site readiness standards, policy and approval templates, flight readiness criteria, documentation, and handoff criteria.
• Ensure the definition of readiness is clear to customers, as agencies often underestimate the policy, approval, and staffing work involved. Early naming of these requirements protects the launch date.
• Hold the line on readiness gates, verifying deployment prerequisites before a dock ships on every account without exception.
• Identify patterns and recurring blockers across launches and drive systemic fixes to ensure the function scales with dock volume rather than headcount.

Represent the customer inside Skydio

• Act as the aggregated voice of the customer to Product and Engineering, and serve as the escalation point for cross-team conflicts affecting launch timelines.
• Ensure a clean post-launch handoff to Customer Success, with clear documentation of configuration, policy commitments, and readiness status. Maintain first-hand product knowledge through frequent hands-on use.

What Makes You a Good Fit:

• 5+ years of relevant experience in customer-facing operations, deployment, implementation, or project delivery roles, including work with public safety customers.
• 1+ years leading a team, formally or as a lead with hiring and mentorship responsibilities. First-time managers with a demonstrated record of leading and developing people will be considered.
• Familiarity with Drone as First Responder concepts of operation and dock-based remote operations. Professional experience is strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated ability to manage complex, cross-functional initiatives with multiple stakeholders and competing priorities, and to build repeatable processes in ambiguous environments.
• Highly organized with strong attention to detail. Comfortable managing timelines, dependencies, and readiness gates across a portfolio.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills. Ability to brief operators, program managers, and senior executives without altering the facts.
• Lead by example. Willing to do whatever is needed to resolve customer situations.

Nice to Have:

• Prior public safety service or experience standing up a Drone as First Responder program on the agency side.
• Experience supporting an agency through a public approval process, such as council or board authorization, public comment, or privacy and data retention policy.
• Experience with dock-based, remote, and BVLOS operations at scale, including site survey, RF and LTE assessment, and network readiness for fixed installations.
• Experience owning a customer onboarding or implementation function during a period of rapid growth.
• Working knowledge of Salesforce, Palantir, Databricks, or equivalents.

What Is Required:

• Ability to travel 50 to 60% of the time, with heavier travel during periods of team growth and onboarding.
• Ability to lift up to 60 lbs unaided.
• Obtaining FAA Part 107 certification within the first 60 days of employment is strongly encouraged for all Skydio employees and required for certain positions.