Senior AI Innovation Specialist (SAIS)

Job Description: Senior AI Innovation Specialist (SAIS)

About KrateoSky

KrateoSky is building the trusted Western champion in AI aerial robotics—a unified perception and actuation platform that will make the skies the world's most trusted and transformative engine of productivity. We are not a drone company. We are the autonomy infrastructure powering robotic flight and aerial intervention across defense, industry, and public safety. We are executing a rapid roll-up strategy to consolidate best-in-class technologies, creating the first at-scale, AI-native alternative.

Speed and scale define our competitive advantage. We move fast by questioning assumptions, removing complexity, and rapidly demonstrating over analyzing. We scale by building certifiable platforms on reusable architectures. Our AI-native, digitally connected ecosystem amplifies this advantage, automating tedious work so engineers focus on novel problem-solving. We keep our back office small and our organization flat to maintain velocity and operate as one integrated team with real-time visibility into trade-offs, risks, and progress.

You're joining at the beginning when your decisions define how we scale to Western leadership. We're building a dream team of high performers to establish the processes, tools, and culture that enable rapid acquisition integration and platform scalability for missions that matter. No PowerPoint purgatory, no "that's how aerospace does it" sacred cows. First principles, data-driven decisions, hands-on execution.

Position Summary

As a Senior AI Innovation Specialist (Product-Focused Full-Stack Builder) in the KrateoSky AI Innovation Office, your mission is to architect, build, and optimize the cognitive systems, operational workflows, and highly interactive interfaces of our enterprise. Because KrateoSky is scaling rapidly through acquisitions, we are committed to maintaining a highly automated, ultra-lean headquarters operating model. You are the elite software builder tasked with ensuring we can seamlessly absorb newly acquired companies and scale globally without adding administrative friction or headcount overhead.

In this role, you will lead the transformation of our corporate operations, finance, and technical workflows into a highly integrated, automated "Digital Thread." You will focus on the "body" of our internal systems: building the end-to-end workflows, user-facing interfaces, and custom applications that collapse cognitive drag and eliminate administrative friction. Utilizing modern AI-assisted development environments (like Cursor and Copilot), you will rapidly code and deploy polished, production-ready full-stack applications, secure serverless integrations, and custom API connectors. You will balance deep backend execution with a strong product and UX/UI intuition, ensuring that the automation systems we build are highly adopted, intuitive, and robust.

Player-coach role: You will be hands-on from day one. You must be comfortable doing the work yourself before you have a team to delegate to. We are looking for a builder who has shipped real systems—not PowerPoints, not just theoretical plans that never left the whiteboard. You think in systems but can get deep into the details when needed.

You are AI-native in how you work—AI agents are your default environment. You generate boilerplate, scaffold modern front-end interfaces, build custom utility scripts, and produce documentation with LLMs, using AI for deep analytical problem-solving, debugging, and task automation. You see AI as the reason a small, elite team can outperform a traditional organization three times its size.

Embody our values and behaviors—deliver precision and quality, challenge how things are done, break problems into fundamentals, automate relentlessly, hold yourself accountable, and deliver together no matter the obstacles. You must exhibit Above the Line behaviors: operating as a Coach, Creator, and Challenger rather than a Victim, Hero, or Villain. You apply automation-first thinking: your default instinct is 'how do we eliminate this manual task' not 'who can I assign this to.' You act as a humble teacher, prioritizing ego-free knowledge sharing and documentation discipline. Finally, you maintain a strong PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) orientation, demonstrating a willingness to experiment, learn from failure, and iterate.

Key Responsibilities

• Full-Stack Application Development: Rapidly design, build, and ship polished, user-facing interfaces and custom interactive web applications (using React/Next.js/Tailwind or similar) that orchestrate complex backend workflows and optimize overall operational efficiency.

• Pragmatic UX & Product Logic: Own product-level decision-making for internal tools, ensuring they are intuitive, reliable, and solve actual user pain points to drive aggressive adoption across the business.

• The Digital Thread Orchestration: Design, build, and maintain our corporate transactional and collaborative systems. Implement robust API integrations and custom connectors that seamlessly bridge business platforms with technical and engineering environments.

• Bespoke Integrations & Agentic Workflows: Where standard platform configurations are insufficient, design and build secure, serverless application interfaces, connectors, and agentic workflows to orchestrate complex, cross-platform processes.

• PortCo Onboarding & Enablement: Join internal engagements with newly acquired portfolio companies to audit technical workflows, identify operational bottlenecks, and upskill local teams to adopt modern AI tools and developer assistants.

• Engineering Quality & Asset Reusability: Document integration patterns, schema designs, and code abstractions, contributing all custom utilities back to KrateoSky’s central code repository to ensure compounding organizational efficiency.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Full-Stack Development, or building production-ready applications with highly technical hands-on integrations.

• Proven Track Record: You have shipped real web applications, custom UI/UX features, or enterprise integrations in production environments (not just R&D, demos, or theory).

• Core Full-Stack Depth: Fluent in Python/TypeScript, modern front-end frameworks (such as React, Next.js, or Tailwind CSS), API orchestration, database/schema design, and deploying applications in a matter of days.

• Modern Development Tooling: Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and building secure, serverless application endpoints.

• AI-Native Proficiency: Extreme comfort using AI-IDEs (e.g., Cursor, Copilot) to achieve a 3-5x productivity gain over traditional software engineering loops.

• UX/UI Intuition & Pragmatism: Strong product mindset with a proven ability to make pragmatic decisions on UX layout, usability, and app reliability without needing external design teams.

• U.S. Person Status: Because this role involves access to export-controlled technical data, applicants must be a "U.S. Person" as defined by ITAR — a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident (green-card holder), or other protected individual. We confirm eligibility after extending an offer.

Desired Qualifications

• Experience at high-velocity hardware-software startups, aerospace, drone, or robotics companies.

• Familiarity with cloud-based CAD/PLM systems or complex technical software toolchains.

• Prior experience executing technical integrations or automating workflows across enterprise business systems.

• Experience working with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or building custom MCP servers.

Logistics

• Location: Boulder, Colorado (On-site required; relocation acceptable)

• Reports To: Head of AI Innovation

• Travel: 10-20% (site visits, subsidiary integration, and collaboration)

• Compensation: $111,000 - $170,500 / year (Targeted base; total package includes comprehensive benefits)