Senior Manager, Solutions Engineering West

Skydio is the leading US drone company and the world leader in autonomous flight, the key technology for the future of drones and aerial mobility. The Skydio team combines deep expertise in artificial intelligence, best-in‑class hardware and software product development, operational excellence, and customer obsession to empower a broader, more diverse audience of drone users, from utility inspectors to first responders, soldiers in battlefield scenarios, and beyond.

Skydio is seeking an experienced Solutions Engineering leader to join our team as Senior Manager, Solutions Engineering for the SLED Top 1200. The Top 1200 is the band of agencies immediately below Majors, and it is where the Drone as First Responder motion moves from bespoke to repeatable, so the work rewards a leader who can build patterns and hold a team to them.

The segment runs as one national team today, and depending on growth it may later split into East and West regions; building the team so that split is clean when it comes is part of the job.

This is a remote role. Travel of approximately 30% is required to support customer engagements, field activities, deployments, team onsites, and company events.

This role reports to the Director, Solutions Engineering – SLED.

The SLED Solutions Engineering team is the technical arm of Skydio's state and local go-to-market motion. We sit between the agency and the product: turning operational problems into program designs, proving capability in the field, and making sure Skydio's products are used, integrated, and flown at scale.

The team is measured on technical win rate, trial and proof of concept outcomes, program expansion, site assessment quality, and the requirements we push back into the product organization.

Solutions Engineers are critical members of the Skydio organization and work closely with Key Account Leaders, Engineering, and Product to support deal progression, customer confidence, successful deployments, and the long-term success of Public Safety sUAS programs.

• Hire, onboard, coach, and retain your team, with clear ownership and coverage across the territories in your segment, and develop people beyond the seat they are in.

• Set the bar for technical quality — demos, trial plans, site assessments, and customer-facing documentation that hold up in front of a chief, a sheriff, or a city council.

• Own capacity across your segment. Decide where Solutions Engineering time goes, say no when it needs to be said, and make the tradeoffs visible to leadership.

• Own the technical win across the Top 1200 nationally, pairing one Solutions Engineer to each Key Account Leader.

• Serve as the senior technical escalation point on critical pursuits, deployments, and customer issues. Jump in and work the problem yourself, and be in the field when it matters.

• Partner with Sales leadership on pipeline, forecast, and account planning, and on the land-and-expand motion that turns a first dock into a citywide program.

• Turn what works in Majors into something repeatable o standards, site assessment quality, and trial design are yours to systematize, and to structure so the segment can split regionally without relearning the motion.

• Own site assessment quality as a performance measure. Solutions Engineers are the DRI for verifying a dock location before deployment, and the quality of the resulting installation reflects on the team.

• Hold the bar on proofs of concept: structured deployments tied to an active opportunity with measurable operational value, not casual evaluations.

• Guide integration and airspace strategy — CAD and dispatch, video and evidence management, streaming platforms,…