Senior Manager of Software Engineering

About the role

DroneDeploy is the reality capture platform for the world's largest projects. More than 40% of the ENR Top 400 construction contractors run on it, alongside energy, mining, and agriculture customers mapping some of the biggest sites on earth. The Aerial team sits at the core of the platform: the processing pipeline that turns thousands of raw drone images into a georeferenced map, the geospatial foundation that makes those maps survey-grade, and the systems that serve imagery, terrain, and measurements at scale. Almost every customer's work starts with something this team built. The team behind it is senior and technically deep and the opportunity ahead is bigger than ever. We're looking for a leader who raises the bar: takes on the most ambitious technical work and proves its impact, gets new capabilities to customers quickly, and shapes how a modern engineering team builds with AI. You don't need to arrive as a geospatial expert, because the team has that depth. You need to be the leader who makes a great team even better.

Responsibilities

• Lead the team to deliver large, business-critical, technical initiatives through to completion.
• Define what success looks like up front and show it in the numbers.
• Make a strong team stronger.
• Focus a senior, distributed team on the highest-impact problems, and grow engineers into technical leaders with broader scope.
• Evolve how the team works with AI.
• Lead from the front with AI in your own work, then make small, AI-heavy pods the way the team builds: planning, prototyping, debugging, and shipping.
• Own the Aerial experience.
• Partner with Product to shape and sequence the roadmap, and own the customer outcome end to end.
• Stay hands-on. PRs, prototypes, and debugging alongside the team.
• Set technical direction with the team's principal engineer, from architecture and boundaries to platform investment.
• Own quality and reliability through metrics and observability, so problems surface before customers find them.
• Represent Aerial to leadership and customers, including site visits.

Requirements

• 8+ years of engineering experience and 5+ years leading engineers, including senior and staff-level ICs
• Complex, multi-quarter technical programs finished predictably, with clear success metrics
• A record of making strong teams stronger. You can point to the engineers who grew and the output that followed
• Hands-on technical depth across web, backend, and cloud systems. You still read and write code, and you're comfortable enough with the underlying math and data to question the results
• AI as a primary working partner across coding, prototyping, and analysis, and evidence that you changed how a team works because of it
• A record of ramping quickly into complex, unfamiliar technical domains
• Customer focus that shows up in product and UX decisions

Skills

• Experience with geospatial, mapping, 3D, imagery, or other data-intensive systems at scale
• Experience in survey, construction, energy, or other industries where being wrong has real consequences for the customer
• Drone/UAV experience or a Part 1