Software Engineering Lead (Drone AI)

Location: Hybrid in West London, United Kingdom; office attendance three days per week and weekly travel to drone flying sites in and around London for on-site R&D testing.

Salary: £40,000–£70,000 per year

Company

A startup building software and aerial tools for infrastructure inspections using drones, automation, AI, and geospatial data.

What you will do

• Lead software development from roadmap planning through production deployment for the Hammer Hub inspection platform.
• Design, develop, test, monitor, and performance-analyse production features.
• Solve drone path-planning and drone-data modelling challenges.
• Plan bi-weekly development sprints and lead collaboration with engineers, consultants, cloud specialists, and senior management.
• Scale web infrastructure with user growth and improve development processes, tooling, and best practices.
• Conduct field tests with drone hardware at sites in and around London.

Requirements

• 3–5 years of software engineering experience, ideally in a SaaS startup.
• Experience with modern frontend frameworks such as React or Vue, and backend frameworks such as Node.js, Flask, or FastAPI.
• Strong understanding of computer science fundamentals, software architecture, and production application deployment.
• Experience with databases, cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, Git, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing.
• Degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Availability for hybrid work in West London three days per week and weekly travel to local drone testing sites.

Nice to have

• Team leadership experience in robotics, gaming, or geospatial organisations.
• Agile development, sprint planning, and project management experience.
• Mobile software development experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Founding-team opportunity with significant influence on aerial robotics and geospatial data products.
• Company equity options.
• 28 holidays, with the option to exchange bank holidays for other days.
• Flexible working hours and equipment including laptops, screens, and headphones.
• Company-provided Mavic Mini drone and an engineering-related book allowance.
• Monthly team lunches and activities; travel to testing sites is paid for.