Software Development Engineer – IV

Technical Leadership | People Leadership | Aereo Cloud

About Aereo

Aereo (earlier known as Aarav Unmanned Systems) is a deep-tech company building the future of how the physical world is mapped, understood and managed.

We build end-to-end drone and geospatial intelligence solutions for enterprises and governments across mining & metals, infrastructure, energy, utilities, urban planning and other large-scale industries.

Our technology brings together aerial robotics, computer vision, GIS, AI and cloud software to solve complex, real-world problems at scale. We are backed by leading Indian VCs and have built a self-sustaining, rapidly growing business with a strong presence in the commercial drone ecosystem.

At Aereo, we believe in solving meaningful problems, moving with urgency, and building technology that creates measurable impact.

About Aereo Cloud

Aereo Cloud is the technology backbone of our geospatial intelligence ecosystem and our enterprise SaaS platform.

The platform enables organizations to securely store, manage, visualize and analyze massive volumes of drone and geospatial data, turning complex spatial data into actionable insights and enterprise workflows.

With workloads operating at PB-scale, Aereo Cloud brings together large-scale data processing, geospatial visualization, analytics and enterprise workflows. As our customer base and use cases grow, we're solving increasingly complex problems around scale, performance, reliability and engineering velocity.

We are looking for a Software Development Engineer – IV to help lead this next phase of engineering at Aereo Cloud.

The Role

This is a senior engineering leadership role combining strong technical ownership with people leadership.

You will lead a team of engineers across one or more key areas of Aereo Cloud while remaining deeply connected to the technical problems the team is solving.

We are looking for someone who has grown from a strong software engineering background into technical and people leadership, someone who can design systems, challenge technical decisions, solve complex engineering problems and still get hands-on when required, while simultaneously building, mentoring and developing a high-performing engineering team.

You won't be expected to spend your days writing code. But you also won't be expected to step away from engineering.

You should be comfortable getting into the details - reviewing designs and code, debugging difficult production issues, prototyping solutions, driving architectural decisions and contributing to critical implementations when needed.

At the same time, you will be responsible for building a team where engineers take ownership, grow in their careers, develop strong technical judgment and consistently raise the engineering bar.

We are not looking for someone who has moved away from engineering into management. We are looking for an engineer who has grown into leadership.

What You'll Do

1. Technical Leadership

• Own the technical direction of your engineering area, aligned with Aereo Cloud's product and business priorities.

• Lead architecture and system design for scalable, reliable and maintainable services and platforms.

• Make pragmatic engineering decisions across scalability, performance, reliability, security, cost and engineering velocity.

• Break down ambiguous and complex problems into clear technical approaches and executable plans.

• Review technical designs, RFCs and critical code changes, raising the quality of engineering decisions across the team.

• Stay close enough to the codebase to understand how systems actually work and where they can fail.

• Dive into complex technical and production problems when the team needs deeper technical expertise.

• Prototype or contribute to implementation for critical, technically challenging or high-leverage problems.

• Identify architectural gaps and technical debt that could limit Aereo Cloud's ability to scale, and drive initiatives to address them.

• Establish and continuously improve engineering standards, development practices and technical guidelines.

• Raise the bar on testing, CI/CD, observability, performance optimisation and production reliability.

2. Engineering Execution

• Own delivery of business-critical engineering initiatives from problem definition through production.

• Translate product requirements and customer problems into clear technical priorities and execution plans.

• Work closely with Product, Design and other engineering teams to make effective technical and product trade-offs.

• Build strong engineering execution rhythms without creating unnecessary process.

• Identify bottlenecks in development, architecture and delivery and continuously improve how the team works.

• Balance short-term product requirements with long-term platform scalability and technical health.

• Take ownership of production health for your area, including reliability, incidents, performance, bugs and root-cause analysis.

• Drive proactive capacity planning, observability and identification of production risks.

• Ensure learnings from incidents and failures translate into lasting engineering improvements.

3. People Leadership & Team Development

• Lead, mentor and develop a high-performing engineering team with a strong culture of ownership and technical excellence.

• Conduct regular 1:1s and provide clear, thoughtful and actionable feedback.

• Understand the strengths, development areas and aspirations of individual engineers and help them grow.

• Coach engineers towards greater technical ownership, independence and decision-making.

• Identify high-potential engineers and develop them into future technical leaders.

• Set clear expectations, goals and measurable outcomes for team members.

• Create an environment where engineers can challenge ideas, take ownership, experiment and learn from failures.

• Maintain a high bar for engineering quality while creating psychological safety for healthy technical debate.

• Support engineers through technical and professional challenges and help them become increasingly effective.

• Take responsibility for performance management, including recognising strong performance and addressing performance gaps.

• Participate actively in hiring, interviewing and onboarding engineering talent.

• Identify capability gaps within the team and work with engineering leadership to build the capabilities required for Aereo Cloud's growth.

4. Product & Business Impact

• Understand the customer and business context behind the problems Aereo Cloud is solving.

• Help engineers connect technical decisions to customer outcomes and business impact.

• Partner closely with Product, Design, Business and customer-facing teams to understand complex problems.

• Influence product and engineering roadmaps through strong technical judgment and a deep understanding of the platform.

• Identify opportunities where engineering investments can unlock new product capabilities or improve customer experience.

• Make thoughtful trade-offs between speed, quality, scalability and long-term technical sustainability.

What We're Looking For

Must Have

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 6+ years of software engineering experience building and operating production-grade systems.

• Meaningful experience providing technical leadership and/or people leadership to a team of engineers.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building production systems at scale.

• Strong understanding of system design, distributed systems, microservices, APIs, databases and cloud-native architectures.

• Strong proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Python, Java, TypeScript/JavaScript, Node.js, Java, Go or similar.

• Experience designing systems with considerations around scalability, performance, reliability and security.

• Demonstrated ability to take technically ambiguous problems from definition through execution and production.

• Experience mentoring engineers and helping them develop greater technical ownership.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively across Engineering, Product, Design and Business teams.

• A strong sense of ownership and the ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving environment.

Preferred

• Experience leading or managing a team of 5+ engineers.

• Experience working in a product or SaaS company.

• Experience owning or significantly influencing a product or engineering roadmap.

• Experience working with large-scale, data-intensive or distributed systems.

• Experience with AWS, GCP or Azure and modern cloud-native technologies.

• Familiarity with containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, observability and infrastructure-as-code.

• Experience working with high-volume data processing, analytics or data platforms.

• Experience with geospatial, GIS, mapping, imagery, computer vision or other spatial/data-heavy applications.

• Experience balancing technical debt, product velocity and long-term architectural investments.

• Experience hiring and developing engineers into technical leadership roles.

• Experience working in engineering teams where engineers have significant ownership of technical and product decisions.

What Success Looks Like

In this role, success isn't simply measured by whether the team delivers its roadmap.

You should leave the engineering organisation stronger than you found it.

Within your first 6–12 months, we expect you to:

• Build a high-trust, high-accountability engineering team.

• Develop engineers into stronger technical owners and future leaders.

• Improve the quality and consistency of technical decision-making.

• Drive meaningful improvements in architecture, reliability and engineering velocity.

• Take ownership of critical technical initiatives and see them through to production.

• Build strong collaboration between Engineering, Product and Business.

• Establish a culture where engineers are encouraged to think deeply, challenge assumptions and own outcomes.

• Become someone engineers actively seek out when they face difficult technical problems.

The goal is not to be the person who has all the answers.

The goal is to build a team that becomes significantly better because you're there.

Why Aereo

You will work on genuinely complex engineering problems at the intersection of cloud software, geospatial intelligence, aerial robotics and large-scale data.

Aereo Cloud processes massive volumes of drone and spatial data and is becoming the digital backbone through which enterprises understand and manage physical assets across mining, infrastructure, energy and other industrial environments.

You'll have the opportunity to influence both the technology we're building and the engineers who build it.

If you've grown from a strong software engineer into someone who enjoys solving hard technical problems, building scalable systems, mentoring engineers and taking ownership of teams and outcomes, this is an opportunity to play a meaningful role in building the next generation of Aereo Cloud.