Overview
Company: Dropla (Danish-Ukrainian defence tech)Location: Kolding/Odense, Denmark (On-site, workshop-based)Type: Full-time, permanent
About the Role
We are building unmanned ground vehicles and edge-AI detection systems, and we have reached the point where engineering has to become a function rather than a group of capable individuals. This role owns that transition.The Head of Engineering owns the platform architecture across mechanical, electrical, software and payload interfaces; the engineering process from requirements through validation to release; the technical release authority that decides what ships; and the hiring and development of the specialist engineers below. This person is also the technical counterpart to demanding professional customers, and the one who puts technical risk in front of the CEO and board in terms they can act on.
RESPONSIBILITIES
■ Define and maintain platform architecture and interface definitions so that four engineering disciplines converge rather than collide.■ Implement and enforce a release gate: redesign, prototype, test, validate, then production — including refusing release when the test evidence is not there.■ Establish configuration management — what is released, what is fitted to which vehicle serial number, and what changed between them.■ Convert product priorities into a resourced, dated engineering plan and report against it without decoration.■ Recruit, onboard and develop the specialist engineering team across two Danish sites, and coordinate technical direction with the engineering centre abroad.■ Represent engineering to customers, procurement authorities, integration partners and auditors.
MUST HAVE
■ MSc or BSc in mechanical, electrical, mechatronic, production or systems engineering.■ 10+ years in hardware product engineering, including at least 3–5 years of line management — leading engineers, not only being the most senior one.■ Has personally taken a complex electromechanical product from design through validation into serial production, and owned the release decision.■ Cross-disciplinary fluency: able to competently challenge a mechanical, an electrical and an embedded-software engineer in the same review without being the specialist in any of them.■ Has introduced engineering process into a company that had none — requirements, change control, configuration management, test and release — without burying a small team in bureaucracy.■ Background in vehicles, robotics, off-highway machinery, marine, aerospace or defence hardware.■ Strong enough to hold a release gate under commercial pressure, including from the CEO.■ Professional English: work authorisation in Denmark; eligible for Danish and NATO security clearance.
Advantageous (Nice to Have)
■ Danish language; familiarity with Danish and NATO defence procurement and acceptance practice.■ Experience with unmanned systems, autonomy stacks, teleoperation or resilient communication links.■ Has scaled an engineering organisation from single digits past twenty people.■ Exposure to CE marking, MIL-STD or STANAG qualification testing.■ Experience running engineering across two sites or two countries.■ Prior work in a venture-funded company, with board-level technical reporting.
We are moving from single builds and demonstrators to repeatable serial vehicle delivery. That depends on something we do not yet have: a senior engineer who personally owns the mechanical design of the platform, the drawing set that describes it, and the prototype loop that proves changes before they reach production.
■ Own the complete mechanical design: chassis, drivetrain mounting, suspension interfaces, enclosures, hatches, payload decks and mounting standards.■ Own the controlled drawing set and 3D master model, with real revision control — no part manufactured from an uncontrolled file.■ Convert the field and assembly issue list into prioritised engineering changes with a defined solution, owner and verification method.■ Design for manufacture and assembly: tolerancing, fastener strategy, weldments, part-count reduction, and an assembly sequence a workshop can repeat.■ Build and validate the updated prototype together with the workshop, and define and sign off the mechanical test programme.■ Own the technical dialogue with machining, welding, sheet metal and assembly suppliers, including first-article inspection.
■ Engineering degree in mechanical, industrial or production engineering, or demonstrably equivalent hands-on seniority.■ 5+ years designing and releasing physical products for manufacture; at least one product that reached serial production under their drawings.■ Expert-level CAD (SolidWorks, Inventor, Fusion 360, Creo or similar) plus real drawing discipline: tolerancing, revision control, released BOM.■ Vehicle, off-road, agricultural machinery, heavy equipment, robotics or defence hardware background — steel and aluminium structures, drivetrains, sealed enclosures.■ Genuinely hands-on: comfortable in a workshop, taking measurements, assembling and disassembling their own designs.■ Able to work where the specification is still moving, and to impose enough structure to make it converge.■ Professional English; work authorisation in Denmark; eligible for Danish and NATO security clearance.
■ Unmanned ground vehicles, robotic platforms or electric drivetrains.■ Danish language.■ FEA and structural simulation; welding and machining process knowledge.■ Has introduced revision control and engineering change process into a young hardware team.
A large share of the problems we see in assembly and in the field are electrical or system-level rather than mechanical: harness routing and strain relief, connector selection, grounding, power budgeting, CAN behaviour, battery management. This role turns a working vehicle into a documented, reliable and reproducible electrical system, and defines the standard interface that third-party payloads plug into.
■ Own the electrical architecture: battery integration, BMS behaviour, charging, protection, fusing, and the power budget per operating mode.■ Produce and maintain schematics, wiring diagrams, harness drawings, connector tables and the labelling scheme as controlled documents.■ Design harnesses for routing, strain relief, ingress sealing and service access, and specify them to harness suppliers.■ Own CAN bus and low-level communications: node addressing, termination, message definition with software, diagnostics.■ Define a standard electrical payload interface — connector, voltage rail, data interface — that third-party systems integrate against.■ Investigate electrical field failures to root cause and close them in the design rather than in the field.
■ Degree in electrical, electromechanical, mechatronic or automation engineering, or equivalent practical seniority.■ 3–5+ years of electrical design on physical machines: vehicles, robotics, industrial machinery, marine or heavy equipment.■ Practical command of low-voltage DC power systems, lithium battery packs and BMS, motor drives and protection design.■ CAN bus in real products, including diagnosis with the tools rather than only in theory.■ Harness design and manufacture in practice: crimping, sealing, connector families (Deutsch, M12, MIL-style), routing for vibration and ingress. ■ECAD documentation ability (Altium, KiCad, EPLAN, SEE Electrical or similar) and the discipline to keep it current.■ Confident with oscilloscope, multimeter, current clamp and electronic load; able to debug a live vehicle.■ Professional English; work authorisation in Denmark; eligible for Danish and NATO security clearance.
■ Embedded firmware experience; able to read code and speak precisely with software engineers.■ EMC pre-compliance and mitigation experience.■ Radio, antenna placement or RF-interference experience.■ Danish language.
Company: Dropla (Danish-Ukrainian defence tech)Location: Kolding/Odense, Denmark (with regular travel to customer sites, training grounds, and test ranges)Type: Full-time, permanent
Our vehicles are demonstrated, delivered and operated by professional users, often in demanding conditions. This role makes customer support and demonstrations a professional, repeatable service function, and converts field experience into structured test data and issue reports that engineering can act on.
■ Plan and execute demonstrations end to end: readiness checks, transport and logistics, on-site setup, operation, recovery and after-action report.■ Operate the vehicle and its control station in realistic conditions, including with payloads fitted.Install, commission, service, repair and retrofit delivered vehicles at customer locations.■ Diagnose mechanical and electrical faults in the field to component level and execute the repair.■ Deliver operator and maintainer training, including train-the-trainer courses, and write the material that goes with it.■ Run speed, range, gradient, payload, battery load and reliability tests to a written plan and record the data.
■ Technical education or trade background — automotive, agricultural machinery, marine, aviation, military vehicle maintenance, electromechanical technician or similar.■ 3+ years of hands-on field service, test or vehicle maintenance work with real customer contact.■ Genuine mechanical and electrical fault-finding on a live machine, with a multimeter and a wiring diagram, without a workshop behind them.■ Composure in front of customers when something goes wrong on a demonstration day.■ Precise reporting habits — a fault report an engineer can act on without a phone call.■ Category B driving licence; comfortable with trailers and vehicle transport.■ Professional English; willing to travel at short notice; physically capable of outdoor field work in Danish conditions.■ Work authorisation in Denmark; eligible for Danish and NATO security clearance.
■ Danish language — a strong advantage for customer and end-user work.■ Military background, particularly vehicle maintenance, EOD, engineering or reconnaissance.■ Unmanned system operating experience; radio and antenna practice; RTK/GNSS setup.■ Instructional or training-delivery experience.■ Category BE or C licence, forklift or crane certification, first aid.
Company: Dropla (Danish-Ukrainian defence tech)Location: Kolding/Odense, Denmark Type: Full-time, permanent
We are developing supervised autonomy for a ground vehicle operating in degraded conditions: an operator plans a route, the vehicle drives it under supervision, and the operator can take over at any moment. This role owns that architecture end to end.
■ Own the navigation architecture: route planning on a pre-mapped corridor, lane holding to a specified tolerance, and safe operator handover at any point.■Own the communications-loss failsafe — the highest operational priority in the programme. Bounded hold and re-acquire, then a controlled retrace along the proven inbound route rather than any blind return-to-base.■ Own obstacle stop and corridor keeping using automotive-grade sensing, with the operator deciding onward movement.■ Own safety arbitration and plausibility checking between autonomy output and the independent emergency stop, watchdog and drive contactor — including the safety case that range approval depends on.■ Hold the scope boundary: defined roads and tracks in, open-terrain traversal out. Defending that line under pressure is part of the job.
■ Senior robotics or autonomy engineer, typically 7+ years, with a navigation stack that ran on real vehicles outside a lab.■ ROS 2 or equivalent; C++ and Python; state estimation, path planning and control on ground platforms.■ Demonstrated work on degraded-conditions autonomy: GNSS-denied or GNSS-intermittent operation, link loss, graceful degradation.■ Safety-case thinking for a machine that moves under its own power near people.■ Willing to be in the field with the vehicle, not only in simulation.■ Professional English; work authorisation in Denmark; eligible for Danish and NATO security clearance.
■ Defence, agricultural, mining or off-highway autonomy experience.■ Behaviour trees or equivalent mission-level arbitration.■ Experience defining what an autonomy system will not do, in writing, for a customer.■ Danish language.
We run edge AI detection on moving vehicles: ground and airborne objects identified in real time, processed entirely on the platform with no cloud dependency. This role owns the models and the data behind them, including a new night capability on thermal imaging.
■ Own model design for real-time ground and air detection from a moving platform, running at the edge.■ Own the night perception capability on thermal stereo, including the domain-shift problem between two different thermal sensor stacks used in two countries.■ Own cross-sensor validation and the acceptance testing that signs the capability off.■ Direct the annotation and training work carried out by our engineering centre abroad, including data quality standards.■ Own inference performance within the compute and power budget of the platform.
■ Senior ML or computer-vision engineer, typically 6+ years, with models that went into production rather than into a paper.■ PyTorch or equivalent; detection and tracking architectures; quantisation and optimisation for edge inference on Jetson-class hardware.■ Practical experience with thermal or multispectral imagery and the domain-shift problem between sensors.■ Comfortable owning a labelling pipeline and judging data quality, not only model architecture.■ Professional English; work authorisation in Denmark; eligible for Danish and NATO security clearance.
■ Detection of small, fast or low-contrast objects against cluttered backgrounds.■ Experience with data collected in uncontrolled operational conditions rather than curated datasets.■ Sensor fusion across optical, thermal and radar.■ Danish language.
This role owns the seams of the system: the real-time data path from detection to action, the interface contract with a partner company that controls the other half of it, electromagnetic coexistence between our own subsystems, and the mission control software the operator actually uses.
■ Own the real-time cue pipeline that converts detections into actionable coordinates under a defined latency budget, with the operator in the decision loop.■ Own the interface control document that binds two companies’ products into one system: common reference frame, message definitions, timing contract, change control.■ Own the EMC and electromagnetic coexistence test campaign, run with a contracted laboratory.■ Own the mission control software and the threat picture presented to the operator.■ Own the engineering interface to manufacturing, so that what is developed can be built on the line that will build it.
■ Senior systems or software integration engineer, typically 6+ years working across hardware and software boundaries.■ Real-time data paths, message middleware, latency budgeting and interface specification as a written discipline.■ EMC test experience, or enough RF literacy to run a campaign with a contracted lab and interpret the results.■ Track record integrating a third-party subsystem where the counterparty controlled half the interface.■ Professional English; work authorisation in Denmark; eligible for Danish and NATO security clearance.
■ Experience with operator-in-the-loop control systems.■ Familiarity with defence interoperability standards.■ Production engineering exposure — DFM from the software and electronics side.■ Danish language.
Our vehicle localises itself by matching what its cameras see against a recent aerial map, corrected by visual-inertial odometry. Accuracy is relative to the planned route rather than absolute. This role owns that subsystem end to end, and with it the accuracy target the whole programme is measured against.
■ Own cross-view matching between the camera view and a recent orthophoto, corrected by visual-inertial odometry.■ Own the mapping pipeline: survey flight to orthophoto to usable map layer, refreshed per mission, on a correct geodetic base.■ Own factor-graph fusion of intermittent absolute corrections with continuous relative estimation — and the honest characterisation of how the system degrades without a fresh map.■ Own the measurement method behind the accuracy target: how adherence is instrumented, logged and proven to a customer.■ Run the experimental precision-GNSS track without letting it become an unfunded delivery commitment.
■ Senior engineer in SLAM, visual geolocalisation or photogrammetry, typically 6+ years, with a shipped system rather than research output.■ Factor-graph or filter-based state estimation in practice; visual-inertial odometry; camera and IMU calibration.■ Working knowledge of geodesy — datums, projections, and why they break systems that ignore them.■ Able to state what a localisation system cannot do, in writing, before a customer discovers it.■ Professional English; work authorisation in Denmark; eligible for Danish and NATO security clearance.
■ Aerial survey and photogrammetry pipelines in production use.■ Experience with localisation in GNSS-denied or GNSS-degraded environments.■ Multi-agent or map-sharing architectures.■ Danish language.
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