Director, Community Safety Team

Skydio is the leading US drone company and the world leader in autonomous flight, the key technology for the future of drones and aerial mobility. The Skydio team combines deep expertise in artificial intelligence, best-in-class hardware and software product development, operational excellence, and customer obsession to empower a broader, more diverse audience of drone users, from utility inspectors to first responders, soldiers in battlefield scenarios, and beyond.

About the Team: Public safety is where drone technology faces the highest stakes. Agencies across the country are standing up Drone as First Responder (DFR) programs that put an aircraft over an emergency within seconds of a 911 call. As drone programs move from the age of tools to the age of infrastructure, we are expanding our public safety sales team to meet that demand.

About the role: As Director, Community Safety Team at Skydio, you will lead the organization that sells into municipal and county law enforcement across two segments: Mid-City, covering agencies of 41 to 100 sworn personnel, and Small Cities, our higher-volume segment below that. The Key Account Directors who run each segment report to you, along with their teams.

This is a second-line leadership role. The fundamentals do not change: recruiting the right people at every level, coaching them into great leaders and sellers, and keeping them here. What changes is where your leverage comes from. You will not run deals, and most days you will not run reps either. You will build and develop the leaders who do, and the hardest discipline of this job is resisting the pull to step back down a level when a deal gets interesting.

Recruiting is the exception to that discipline. At this stage, headcount is the constraint on how fast this business grows, and hiring is not something you hand to your Directors and inspect from a distance. You will be in the market constantly, for sellers as much as for leaders, and the candidates at the top of the market will often need a conversation with you before they say yes.

Three things sit with you that sit with no one below you. You own the combined number across two segments that run very different motions, and the judgment to manage and measure them differently. You represent this business to the rest of Skydio: the forecast, the capacity plan, and an honest account of what is working and what is not. And you own the executive relationships with our largest strategic partners, at their leadership level rather than deal by deal, where the terms of how we grow together actually get set.

You will also set the standard for how the organization works, not only what it sells. We sell autonomous flying robots and the artificial intelligence that powers them. Every seller here uses AI tools as a normal part of running a territory, and you will model that, coach to it, and hire for it.

This is a highly competitive market, and much of the work happens alongside our channel. Your teams will sell against incumbent platforms and well-funded challengers, and you will set the standard for how they win.

Location: Remote, United States

How we work

These are the standards we hire to, and as a leader you own them for your organization. You set the bar in who you hire, what you coach to, and what you tolerate.

• High integrity. Public safety is a tight-knit community. Chiefs and Sheriffs talk to each other, and a reputation for straight answers travels fast. We sell what the ecosystem is actually capable of, we are clear about where the product is today and where it's headed, and we win on our own merits. There's no compromise here.

• Sales is a team sport. One team. No lone wolves. Deals are won by account leaders, sales engineering, business development, channel, marketing, strategic relationships, government relations, and mission success pulling in the same direction, and our partners are part of that team, not a channel to be managed around. The best people here care more about the collective number than their own slice of it.

• Great conversationalists. This is the craft of the job: asking better questions than anyone else in the room, listening for what a chief or sheriff isn't saying, real curiosity about how an agency operates. Not polish, not a rehearsed pitch. Trust in this market is built one honest conversation at a time, and it is the thing competitors cannot copy.

• Curious, and fluent with the tools. Everyone on this team uses AI as a normal part of their work: researching agencies, preparing for meetings, analyzing pipeline, drafting and then editing. That takes taste more than technical skill: knowing what a quality creation looks like, describing a problem precisely enough to get it, and catching the harness when it is confidently wrong. The same muscle makes a great seller. Discovery is specifying the problem; qualification is checking the output. We hire people who are curious about how things work, whether that's an agency's budget, a council's politics, or the aircraft's autonomy, and who have spent the last two years embracing A.I. rather than waiting to be told to use it.

How you'll make an impact

Recruit

• Own hiring across the organization, sellers and leaders alike. Recruiting is a first-order responsibility of this job, not something you delegate downward and review in a weekly report

• Recruit, select, and close the Key Account Directors who run Mid-City and Small Cities

• Stay personally in seller hiring across both segments: source actively, keep a live network, show up in interview loops, and close the candidates who need time with you to say yes

• Hire leaders for coaching ability, not closing ability. The strongest seller is not automatically the strongest leader, and your hardest calls will live in that gap

• Build the bench before you need it: know who your next two or three Directors are, and make sure someone is developing them now

• Hold one evidence bar across both segments and both levels: attainment stated year by year with the misses included, retention history, deal stories with the mechanics of how the agency bought, and something the candidate has built or changed in how they work

• Own the process itself. The same structured loop, the same core questions, and independent scoring, so a Small Cities hire and a Mid-City hire clear the same bar

Coach

• Coach the coaches. Your leverage is your Directors' judgment, not your own deal instincts

• Sit in on their 1:1s, deal reviews, and forecast calls, and give feedback on how they lead rather than only on what the pipeline says

• Develop each Director's weakest muscle deliberately: recruiting for one, forecast discipline for another, executive presence for a third

• Stay in the field a few times a quarter with sellers, not only with your Directors, so your read on the business is first-hand and not filtered

• Raise AI fluency across both segments: shared workflows for agency research, call prep, RFP response, and pipeline analysis, and hold the line that nothing AI-drafted reaches an agency unreviewed

Retain

• Build an organization people don't want to leave: clear expectations, real development paths, and recognition that lands

• Own quota and territory architecture across both segments so the math is achievable, the split is equitable, and the two segments are not competing with each other

• Own the career path from Small Cities to Mid-City: the promotion ladder for sellers, and the credit and handoff mechanics when an account graduates

• Fix the structural causes of attrition rather than only the individual ones: bad territory design, unclear comp, or a leader who is the problem

Run the business

• Own the combined number across Mid-City and Small Cities: pipeline coverage, forecast accuracy, linearity, and the analysis behind them

• Manage two different motions on their own terms. Small Cities runs on volume and velocity, Mid-City on complexity and cycle length, and measuring them the same way will quietly break one of them

• Represent this business to the rest of Skydio: forecast and business reviews, headcount and capacity planning, and a clear, unvarnished account of what is working and what is not

• Own the segment model end to end, including the upmarket handoff from Small Cities to Mid-City, since no one below you owns both sides of it

• Bring customer insight, competitive intelligence, and product and policy gaps to Marketing, Product, and Government Relations, and carry enough credibility that it changes roadmaps

Build strategic partnerships

• Own executive relationships with our largest channel and technology partners, at their leadership level rather than deal by deal

• Run joint business planning with partner leadership: shared targets, coverage models, investment, and a review cadence that holds both sides accountable

• Be the escalation point when a partner relationship is strained and the sponsor when it is working

• Keep partner strategy consistent across both segments so our partners experience one Skydio rather than two

What makes you a good fit

Required

• 3+ years in sales leadership including experience leading other managers, or a strong first-line leader with a clear, evidenced case for the step up

• 6+ years total in enterprise software, hardware, or SaaS sales, including personal success closing complex, multi-stakeholder deals

• A record of hiring at both levels: managers you developed, and sellers you personally sourced, interviewed, and closed. Recruiting is a large part of this job and we will go deep on it

• Team attainment you can state year by year, including the year you missed and what you changed

• Experience owning a number across more than one sales motion or segment, and a point of view on how they should be managed differently

• Executive relationship experience with channel or technology partners at a leadership level, including joint planning you can describe and results it produced

• Comfort representing a business upward: forecast, capacity planning, and an honest account of what is and is not working

• Experience selling or leading teams into SLED customers, with working knowledge of procurement vehicles, budget and grant cycles, and what it takes to get a program approved by a council or commission

• Daily, systematic use of AI tools in your own work, and at least one workflow, analysis, or tool you built or changed in the last two years that made you or your team measurably better. (We will ask you to show it, not describe it)

• Strong voluntary retention history, and the judgment to move quickly when a leader is not right for the seat

• Executive presence with agency leadership, partner executives, and your own organization, and high personal integrity under quota pressure

• Ability to travel at least 50% of the time

• Obtaining FAA Part 107 certification within the first 60 days of employment is strongly encouraged for all Skydio employees and required for certain positions.

Preferred

• Experience in public safety, specifically law enforcement, fire, or emergency management

• Experience standing up or scaling a segment model that runs more than one motion

• You have built something with AI that other people use, whether a research tool, an analysis, or a team workflow, and you can talk about what the first version got wrong

• Curiosity that shows: you can explain how something outside sales works, an agency budget, an airspace waiver, the aircraft's autonomy, in plain language, and you learn fast

• Familiarity with MEDDPICC, Salesforce, Palantir, Anthropic, Cursor, Slack, Google Workspace

• UAV, robotics, or emerging technology background, and comfort in a fast-moving environment

What to expect from our process

We run a structured process and we tell you what it is. A 30-minute conversation with the hiring manager. A deep dive on your leadership record: hiring at both levels, developing and exiting managers, retention, and the team number year by year. A working session where you use your own AI tools on a realistic cross-segment problem and walk us through your choices. A panel on the public safety market, how you would run two segments with different motions, and how you would approach our largest partner relationships. A conversation about how you think. References with people who worked for you, with you, and above you. Every interviewer scores independently against the same rubric before we compare notes.

On AI in the process: draft your resume yourself and refine it with AI if you like; we want your real experience, well expressed. Use whatever tools you want to prepare. Expect to use them in the working session. Leave them off during the conversational interviews so we can see how you think in real time. We use AI to draft job descriptions like this one and to take notes, and a human makes every hiring decision.

Compensation: At Skydio, our compensation packages for regular, full-time employees include competitive base salaries, equity in the form of stock options, and comprehensive benefits packages. Compensation will vary based on factors, including skill level, proficiencies, transferable knowledge, and experience. Relocation assistance may also be provided for eligible roles. The annual base salary range for this position is $172,800 - $216,000 + commission*. Fundamentally, we believe that equity is the key to long-term financial growth, and we ensure all regular, full-time employees have the opportunity to significantly benefit from the company's success. Regular, full-time employees are eligible to enroll in the Company’s group health insurance plans. Regular, full-time employees are eligible to receive the following benefits: Paid vacation time, sick leave, holiday pay and 401K savings plan. This position and all associated benefits are subject to applicable federal, state, and local laws, as well as the Company’s policies and eligibility criteria.

*Compensation for certain positions may vary based on the position’s location.

#LI-WM1

At Skydio we believe that diversity drives innovation. We have created a multidisciplinary environment that embraces the power of diverse perspectives to create elegant solutions for complex problems. We are committed to growing our network of people, programs, and resources to nurture an inclusive culture.

Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or other characteristics protected by federal, state or local anti-discrimination laws.

For positions located in the United States of America, Skydio, Inc. uses E-Verify to confirm employment eligibility. To learn more about E-Verify, including your rights and responsibilities, please visit