Manager, Software Engineering - Cloud infrastructure

About Pyka Pyka’s goal is to provide society with a new form of safe, clean, and cost-effective transportation enabled by autonomous electric aviation. To get there, we’re taking a different approach than most. We're applying our technologies to every industry where autonomous electric aircraft can be useful, starting with the highest value and most dangerous jobs. In doing so, we're building game-changing products manufactured at scale, while perfecting the safety, reliability, and capabilities of our autonomy engine and electric propulsion systems. We design, develop and manufacture an ecosystem of technologies including proprietary flight control software, avionics, high power density motors, motor controllers, batteries, and custom carbon-fiber composite airframes. Today, we supply autonomous electric aircraft for cargo transport and crop protection to real-world customers across four separate continents and have secured industry-first regulatory approvals from the FAA. Our cargo aircraft enables remote connectivity, enhances express delivery networks, and ensures fast and reliable shipping of critical supplies to areas in need. Our crop protection aircraft offers agricultural services providers and farmers an autonomous tool to make aerial application safer, more precise, and less harmful to surrounding environments. Both vehicles are highly economical to operate, easy to deploy, and significantly reduce CO2 emissions in their respective industries. What you work on at Pyka makes people’s lives better now and brings the future of electric aviation one step closer each day.

Role Overview Pyka is looking for a Cloud Infrastructure Manager to lead the team building and operating the cloud systems, data infrastructure, and developer tools that support our autonomous aircraft programs. Your team will build the infrastructure behind aircraft logs and operational data, software distribution, CI pipelines and machine learning pipelines, helping engineers develop and ship software efficiently and making data accessible and useful across the company. In this role, you’ll be responsible for both team execution and team health, making sure your team delivers high-quality work while growing as engineers. You’ll work closely with engineering, flight operations and customer success teams to set priorities and build infrastructure that scales with our company and fleet.

Some of the current and future projects your team will contribute to include:

• Building and improving systems for collecting, storing, and accessing aircraft logs and operational data to support debugging, analysis, and fleet insights
• Improving our CI pipelines, build systems, and software release and distribution processes
• Developing infrastructure for machine learning pipelines, including data preparation and training
• Improving data management, access and analysis across the company
• Automating infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and deployment
• Developing internal tools and integrations that reduce manual work across engineering and operations
• Developing external tools for customers to access and visualize their flight, maintenance and inventory data
• Improving monitoring, recovery processes, security, and cost efficiency as our infrastructure grows

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of engineers to deliver infrastructure and tooling projects end-to-end, from requirements definition to deployment and ongoing maintenance

• Own team and project roadmaps, balancing company priorities, operational needs, and long-term infrastructure improvements

• Own project execution, defining milestones and priorities, tracking progress, and adjusting as requirements evolve

• Own the infrastructure and practices for managing aircraft and engineering data

• Guide infrastructure decisions with attention to security, scalability, performance, and cost

• Hire, onboard, mentor, and support engineers through regular feedback and coaching

• Contribute technically when needed to guide architecture, review designs, debug complex issues, or unblock work

Preferred Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in software engineering, cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, or related roles

• Prior experience managing engineers, including coaching, setting priorities, and supporting individual development

• Experience designing, deploying, and operating production systems on Google Cloud, including Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery

• Strong technical foundation in Python, Linux systems, networking, databases, and modern software development workflows

• Experience with infrastructure as code (e.g. pulumi), CI/CD systems, containers, and deployment automation

• Familiarity with infrastructure supporting data analysis and machine learning workflows

• Experience improving system reliability through monitoring, incident response, and operational practices

• Experience with cloud security, access management, and cost management

• Strong technical judgment and the ability to make practical tradeoffs between immediate needs and long-term maintainability

• Experience working across teams to turn ambiguous engineering and operational needs into concrete plans

• Comfortable working in fast-moving and highly collaborative environments with evolving priorities

• Experience supporting robotics, autonomous systems, or other hardware-focused engineering teams is a plus

Compensation & Benefits

• $180,000–$250,000 salary per year + equity. Compensation will vary depending on location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Salary ranges are subject to change.
• Employer-sponsored health, dental and vision insurance
• FSA with employer matching
• 401(k)
• Paid holidays, generous PTO, and additional unpaid time off
• Voluntary short-term disability, long-term disability, and life insurance
• Pre-tax commuter benefits
• Free catered lunch and plenty of snacks

Export Control Requirements This position requires access to technology, software and other information that is subject to governmental access control restrictions, due to export controls. Employment in this position is conditioned on the continued availability of government authorization to authorize release of such items, to the extent required, including without limitation an export license, or other documentation required to establish authorization to receive access to such items. Company may delay commencement of employment, rescind an offer of employment, terminate employment, and/or may modify job responsibilities, compensation, benefits, and/or access to Company facilities and information systems, as Company deems appropriate, in order to ensure compliance with applicable government access control restrictions.

-- We do not work with external recruiters; if you are an external recruiter, please do not reach out.