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Skydio

Mid-sized

Skydio is an American drone manufacturer specializing in autonomous flight technology and AI-powered navigation. The company produces self-flying drones used for enterprise, public safety, defense, and infrastructure inspection applications, and is known for its advanced obstacle-avoidance and autonomy software.

2 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Skydio·Machine Learning Engineer·Take-home Assignment

Jun 2026
Take-home assignment for an ML Engineer role at Skydio, focused entirely on building an image segmentation pipeline from scratch. Pretty involved for a take-home, covering everything from data loading to inference scripts and a written explanation of your choices.
  • Build a complete image segmentation pipeline: data loading and augmentation, an encoder-decoder model (like U-Net), a training script with appropriate loss functions, evaluation metrics including IoU, an inference script that outputs mask images, and a short writeup on your design decisions and trade-offs.

“This is a lot to ask for a take-home.”

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Skydio·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Technical phone screen for an Autonomy Engineer role at Skydio, about an hour long, focused almost entirely on walking through your research and then getting grilled on the fundamentals underneath it. Pretty research-heavy compared to what I expected from a drone autonomy gig.
  • Walk me through one or two of your research projects in depth, covering the motivation, dataset, model architecture, training setup, evaluation, and anything that surprised you along the way.
  • How do optimizers like SGD and Adam differ, and how would you think about choosing a learning rate schedule for your training setup?
  • What regularization techniques did you use in your projects, and how did you decide between them?
  • Compare CNN and Transformer architectures. When would you reach for one over the other for a vision task?
  • What current trends in deep learning are most relevant to the work you've been doing, and how do you see them applying here?

“This was the bulk of the interview.”

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