We build drones with unlimited range (by recharging on power lines). The grid is the world’s largest machine. Thus, we can collect data anywhere, anytime. We're selling a full-stack inspection service to power utilities by delivering reports with annotated photos of equipment that is broken or at risk. Our mission is to find faults and other maintenance concerns before they spark wildfires. Today power utilities are our customer, but tomorrow they'll be our deployment partner. At scale we are a new infrastructure layer for data on the physical world.

About Voltair

We build drones that recharge on power lines. The grid is everywhere. This allows our drones to collect spatial data anywhere. Think: unlimited range drones.

Today, Voltair operates as a full-stack inspection service for power utilities. 

• Half the team runs field operations: driving trucks, flying drones, coordinating inspections, and selling the service. 
• The other half builds the drone hardware and autonomy software that make this possible.

Role

We are seeking a Founding Software Engineer to spearhead power utility report generation and delivery. This role will be involved in building the analysis software and custom integrations that deliver an unprecedented inspection service to power utilities.

Location: Mission District, SF
Start: ASAP

Eligibility Notice: This position is open only to candidates who are legally authorized to work in the United States. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

Key Technical Contributions

• Data Infrastructure & Report Delivery: Build scalable database infrastructure supporting Petabyte-scale sensor data and labelled imagery datasets. Implement pipelines for generating inspection reports and build custom software integrations for customer GIS and work order platforms.
• Machine Learning: Support the implementation and optimization of visual machine learning algorithms for the automated detection and classification of power grid anomalies from high-resolution aerial imagery.

Work Style

• In-person work is strongly preferred / required. We have an office in the Mission.

Our drones recharge inductively from power lines by harvesting the magnetic field with a current transformer. We build custom drones with COTS parts. We collect visual and thermal data. Soon we'll fly our drones BVLOS over LTE, but today our field technicians collect data on-site. We run this data through a MV pipelines and then deliver the GIS and PDF reports to our customers.

Our Hardest Challenges

• Performant recharging on distribution lines
• Drone weather hardening & reliability
• Tele-operations & autonomy
• Mission planning with (1) range / recharge locations (stochastic!) (2) weather (3) FAA and other compliance constraints + traveling inspector problem
• Cost effective uplink & data management / MV on the edge