Manufacturing Software Engineer Intern

About the role:

At Skydio, our mission is to make the world more productive, creative, and safe with autonomous flight. We have a deep belief in the transformative power of drones, and our products are used in critical industries across the world.

Customers choose Skydio because:

• We’ve invested in AI and autonomy since the inception of the company ten years ago. Our drones fly more intelligently than anything else in the market, turning any user into an expert pilot.
• Our products are simple-to-use and reliable due to vertical integration. We build all parts of the software stack in-house, including embedded systems, middleware, autonomy, cloud services, and manufacturing infrastructure.
• We are a U.S. company and assemble our drones at our factory in California.

In working with this software infrastructure team, you’ll be at the center of Skydio’s efforts to scale manufacturing, where our drones and the factories that build them are complex, collaborative systems. Our software guides production and tracks the history of every part, enabling efficient testing, validation, and quality assurance for every product we ship. To meet global customer demand, we need to level-up our software architecture to handle more product lines, more factories, bigger teams of contributors, and integration with external partners, all while keeping quality extremely high.

The core team consists of high performing software engineers working in a cross-functional environment. Projects sit at the intersection of backend services, embedded software, frontend UI, and electrical engineering.

You don’t need hardware experience — but being passionate about hardware-software systems would really make you a great fit for the role.

 Our tech:

• Python + Flask services
• Protobufs for IPC and RPC
• React + Typescript frontend
• On-premises containerized Linux client machines and servers deployed to the factory with Ansible.
• Terraform + AWS backend cloud
• Hardware-In-the-Loop build validation systems
• Internally developed framework for manufacturing and testing operations

Team Project Examples:

• Build and maintain a Hardware-In-the-Loop system for continuous testing of the hardware and software components of our drones and build systems.
• Design a deployment system for sending code to physical machines all over the globe, inside of challenging and insecure networks, with redundant safety systems, fast rollbacks, and A/B validation schemes.
• Build a visual configuration tool for documenting and changing how mass production processes work and change on the fly.
• Optimize our robot calibration process that can distinguish between hardware and software failures and suggest next steps for assembly rework.
• Create a dashboard that visualizes the state of the factory to help engineers debug faster.
• Develop an automated fixture that assesses drone sensors and actuators to minimize operator interaction.

How you'll make an impact:

• Work with passionate, impact oriented software engineers on projects that range from front to back end to infrastructure, enabling us to reliably scale across multiple factories and contract manufacturer sites.
• Help design secure, efficient, observable, and robust software for dealing with real-time and historical data generated by the factory, empowering other teams to investigate yield issues and make decisions.
• Keep the factory running smoothly by establishing processes, best-practices, APIs and tooling that help test authors write predictable and maintainable code against our framework.
• Work in a very cross functional environment with multiple stakeholders and dependencies.
• Look at a process and ask, "How can this be eliminated or made faster, more reliable, scalable, and less human-dependent?" - and then make that happen.

What makes you a good fit:

• You have strong software fundamentals and are proficient in an object oriented coding language like Pytho, C++ or Java.
• You have excellent communication skills, speak up when blocked and ask questions when things are not clear to help you land the right solution for the problem at hand.
• You are excited about working on an infrastructure system that can scale to multiple geographic locations and large volume production.
• Working with software and hardware systems (think robotics) is something you are passionate about
• You love building great products and are eager to design software systems that automate and coordinate human-robot interactions at scale.
• You get pumped watching How It's Made or playing Factorio and want to get paid to work on the machine that builds the machines.

Compensation Range: The annual base salary range for this position is $41/hr for Undergrad, $53/hr for Graduate students, and $58 for PhD students*. Compensation will vary based on factors, including skill level, proficiencies, transferable knowledge, and experience. In addition to base salary, Skydio full-time employees are eligible to enroll in our benefit plans and take advantage of a variety of incentives and stipends.

*For some positions the pay may be dependent upon the individual's regional location.

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