Founding Engineer (Raad)

At Raad, we move and ship at a blistering pace. You’ll be the counterweight to the chaos that ensues - a detail-obsessed and process-driven engineer who brings stability.

This person will face foundational problems in geospatial systems that nobody has solved:

1. How do we manage to ingest, QC, and stream millions of high-resolution drone camera files from hundreds of pilots who have completely heterogeneous networks, browsers, hardware, and bandwidths?
2. How do we optimize our storage and processing (creating maps from underlying JPEGs) stack, balancing cost, redundancy, and throughput?
3. And how do we expose this data cleanly and predictably through APIs, so our enterprise customers can consume it directly in their own GIS, underwriting, and asset management systems?
4. And ultimately, how do we autonomously coordinate and control thousands of drones in the air, anywhere on earth, with absolute reliability?

You will:

• Manage Raad’s infrastructure and networking stack
• Write clean, reliable Rails code every single day.
• Sniff and rip out technical debt and replace it with leaner, more performant code.
• Build out our entire internal dashboard, APIs to pipe data to customers, and worker. queues for mission dispatch, data uploads, and QC.
• Help define our product architecture so it scales 10× without exploding.

• Deep Ruby on Rails experience.
• Obsession with clarity, code hygiene, and maintainability.
• Comfort in high-speed, low-spec environments.
• Ability to debug production incidents without panic.
• Familiarity with arcGIS, Sidekiq, PostgreSQL, Redis, and AWS-adjacent infrastructure. Curiosity about drones, mapping, or geospatial data (nice to have, not required).

• A seat next to the CTO, shaping every technical decision.
• The chance to work on code that touches the physical world, literally aircraft in motion.
• Fast feedback loops, zero bureaucracy, no Jira theater.
• A team that values intensity, ownership, and precision over resume lines.
• Benefits, vacation

By coordinating thousands of FAA-certified commercial pilots, Raad delivers persistent aerial coverage of U.S. critical infrastructure. Our network executes hundreds of missions each month, including thermal inspections of solar arrays, LiDAR mapping of transmission and distribution corridors, and large-scale roof and façade captures for commercial properties.

The Raad Platform is the orchestration layer that sits behind it all. It ranks pilots by reputation, equipment class, and compliance status; deterministically matches missions to pilots based on airspace, payload, and proximity; automates dispatch and flight planning; streams telemetry and imagery from the edge; and performs real-time QC and metadata validation while pilots are still in the field.

Raad abstracts the operational complexity of aerial data collection into software. By evolving from supervised flight operations to autonomous, dock-based missions, we’re building the infrastructure to deliver ground-truth visual data to any asset on earth an order of magnitude faster and cheaper than today’s human-driven workflows.