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.

As a Founding Autonomy Engineer, you will serve as the principal architect of our autonomy stack. You will lead the development of sensor fusion and high-level navigation systems, enabling our quadcopters to autonomously fly line corridors while negotiating complex environments containing vegetation and critical infrastructure.

Key Responsibilities

• Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion: Design and implement robust state estimation pipelines by fusing data from IMUs, mmWave radar, stereo disparity maps, and VIO drivers.
• Precision Control & Perching: Engineer specialized control laws and flight patterns to enable autonomous takeoff, landing, and perching on power grid infrastructure.
• Path Planning: Develop intelligent path planning algorithms that optimize for high-resolution data capture of utility pole equipment while maintaining safe standoff distances.
• Hardware Integration: Collaborate closely with the hardware engineering team to optimize sensor placement and integration.
• Safety & Compliance: Develop Detect and Avoid (DAA) behaviors to ensure safe operation and compliance with evolving FAA regulations.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• ROS2 Architecture: Demonstrated experience architecting and managing complex ROS2 graphs for autonomous systems.
• State Estimation: Proven ability to implement and tune sensor fusion algorithms (EKF/UKF).
• Simulation to Field: Experience validating algorithms in high-fidelity simulation (Gazebo) before leading rigorous real-world flight testing.

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