Head of Safety and Airworthiness

Position Summary

Krateo Sky is hiring a Head of Safety and Airworthiness to serve as the company’s independent safety-of-flight authority. Your mission is to design, implement, and scale the company’s Safety Management System (SMS), airworthiness governance, and operational safety architecture so our UAS platforms can be developed, tested, approved, and deployed safely at high velocity—including BVLOS and other higher-risk operations.

This is a hands‑on player‑coach role for a leader who can solve technical problems directly while also building the people, processes, and operating discipline required to scale across a growing organization.

As an AI‑native and automation‑first leader, the default instinct is to eliminate manual tasks. This leader will use AI and automation as productivity multipliers to reduce manual work, improve engineering throughput, and help teams focus on the highest‑value technical problems. The leader embodies our values: deliver precision, challenge assumptions, break problems into fundamentals, and execute hands‑on without ego to ensure product lines seamlessly pull from—and contribute to—shared, robust capability assets.

• Own Krateo Sky’s Safety Management System (SMS), including safety policy, risk management, safety assurance, and safety promotion.
• Serve as the independent safety authority for UAS development, integration, flight‑test governance, operational release, and return‑to‑flight decisions.
• Establish safety and airworthiness governance frameworks that are rigorous, practical, audit‑ready, and compatible with startup velocity, including training standards, approval artifacts, operating limitations, objective evidence expectations, and decision gates for flight release and operational approval.
• Define safety and airworthiness criteria for test readiness, flight readiness, operational release, and return‑to‑flight decisions.
• Provide independent assessment of whether hazards, mitigations, operational limitations, and residual risks are sufficiently understood and controlled to proceed with test or deployment.
• Build safety processes from the ground up using frameworks such as MIL-STD-882E and 14 CFR Part 5, with enough rigor and clarity to be replicated across future acquisitions.
• Define and maintain hazard tracking, safety risk registers, safety review processes, mishap review structures, and safety‑significant corrective‑action governance.
• Exercise stop‑test and no‑fly authority when risk is not adequately understood or controlled.
• Convene and lead anomaly, incident, and mishap review boards, with direct escalation paths to the CTO and CEO.
• Review engineering changes, waivers, deviations, and operational exceptions for safety and airworthiness impact in coordination with SEIT, Quality, Certification, and product leadership.
• Define the minimum objective evidence required to support flight release, waiver and approval packages, operational approval, and safety case claims, and assess whether that evidence is sufficient from a safety and airworthiness standpoint.
• Ensure safety‑significant anomalies, incidents, and mishaps are investigated to sufficient depth, with verified corrective actions, documented operational restrictions as needed, and clear return‑to‑flight criteria.
• Establish safety reporting, escalation, and lessons‑learned mechanisms that strengthen organizational learning across engineering, test, and field operations.
• Partner closely with engineering, flight operations, certification, systems engineering, quality, and legal/regulatory teams to embed safety into development and operations rather than bolt it on afterward.
• Support FAA, EASA, DoD, and customer‑facing approvals, waivers, certification efforts, and airworthiness/safety evidence development as needed, in coordination with Certification, Legal/Regulatory, Quality, and product leadership.
• Assess acquisition targets for safety maturity, SMS readiness, safety culture, waiver/approval posture, flight‑operations discipline, and airworthiness readiness, and lead post‑acquisition harmonization into the Krateo Sky operating model.

• 8+ years of experience in aviation safety,…