Technical Project Manager

At SiFly, we’re building a new category of aircraft: vertical-takeoff, long-endurance drones that deliver helicopter-level performance at drone economics. After thousands of flight tests and years of engineering, our NDAA-compliant platform flies more than 2 hours in hover or 3 hours in forward flight on a single charge — matching the capability of traditional helicopters at a fraction of their cost and operational burden. We merge aerial robotics, perception, and onboard intelligence to cut complexity and minimize human intervention, and our unique approach to communications and networking unlocks remote operations from day one. It’s an ambitious mission, and we’re a small team that moves fast.

The role

We’re hiring our first Technical Project Manager to bring structure and momentum to software development across the company. You’ll work with our cloud and embedded software teams — spanning multiple time zones across Europe and the US — keeping priorities clear, dependencies visible, and new development efforts moving on schedule.

This is a hands-on, high-ownership role for someone who thrives in ambiguity. As the first project manager at SiFly, you won’t inherit a playbook — you’ll build one. You’ll run our daily and weekly standups, drive alignment between distributed engineering teams, and give leadership a clear, honest picture of what’s on track and what needs attention.

Experience with aerospace, robotics, or other complex hardware/software products is a big plus, but we’ll seriously consider the right background paired with genuine curiosity and a drive to learn.

What you’ll do

• Run daily and weekly standups (virtually) with our software engineering teams across Europe and the US, keeping efforts coordinated across time zones.
• Project management for both cloud and embedded software — tracking priorities, dependencies, milestones, and risks across teams.
• Turn high-level goals into clear, sequenced development plans, and keep them current as things change.
• Surface and unblock cross-team dependencies before they become bottlenecks, especially where cloud and embedded work meet.
• Give engineering leadership a clear, honest view of status, tradeoffs, and timelines — and flag problems early.
• Establish lightweight processes and tooling for planning, tracking, and communication that fit a fast-moving team — without adding bureaucracy.
• Coordinate releases and integration efforts, working closely with the Software, Firmware, Electrical, Integration, and Test teams.
• Help our distributed teams stay connected, aligned, and moving in the same direction.

What we’re looking for

• Proven experience as a technical project manager for software — ideally spanning both cloud/backend and embedded/firmware development.
• A track record of running standups and driving delivery across distributed, multi-time-zone engineering teams.
• Strong technical fluency: enough software background to earn engineers’ trust, dig into dependencies, and understand tradeoffs across the stack.
• Excellent communication and organizational skills, and the ability to manage many varied efforts simultaneously.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward action — you can build process from scratch and adapt it as the team grows.
• First-principles thinking and the judgment to know when to add structure and when to get out of the way.
• Willingness to overlap with European working hours as needed to keep teams in sync.

Nice to have

• Experience in aerospace, defense, robotics, automotive, or other complex hardware + software domain.
• Familiarity with real-time or safety-critical embedded systems and the constraints that come with them.
• Experience coordinating software that ships on physical products and ties into field testing.
• Hands-on experience with modern planning and issue-tracking tools and CI/CD workflows.
• A background in software engineering earlier in your career.

Location

Santa Clara, CA or Remote (East Coast preferred)