Engineering Lead

IMPORTANT: WE CANNOT PROVIDE VISA SPONSORSHIP DETAILS Preferred starting date: ASAP Weekly availability: full-time (40 hours/week) Location: Aerospace Innovation Hub, Delft, the Netherlands Reports to: COO ABOUT THE COMPANY Fiducial is a young but fast-growing deep-tech start-up with big ambitions at the frontier of autonomy, perception, and defence. Currently, we are developing software for advanced on-board UAV situational awareness in military applications. Using low-cost and widely available sensors and compute, our solutions are built for scalability. From there, we plan to develop a line-up of interconnected solutions to safeguard European safety. Our team consists of engineers that are passionate about the technology and solutions they develop. The only time most of us are not thinking about the technology is when we are asleep, and sometimes even then. Our team members have a background in different fields such as Aerospace Engineering, Computational Science and Engineering, Robotics and Computer Graphics. Our office is located in the Aerospace Innovation Hub, a start-up hub located on the TU Delft campus in the faculty of Aerospace Engineering. We work closely with top-tier partners, ranging from government agencies and prime contractors to academic research institutes and other start-ups. Our projects span from large tender orders in collaboration with partners to low TRL research with government agencies. Whether through formal R&D programs or rapid prototyping tracks, we operate at the intersection of innovation and deployment. YOUR ROLE As Engineering Lead, you will lead and grow Fiducial’s multidisciplinary engineering team across software and hardware domains. You will play a key role in strengthening and extending our engineering foundations, ensuring they remain robust, scalable, and aligned with the company’s growth trajectory. Over the past months, Fiducial’s engineering organization has matured significantly, with clearer ownership, improved delivery rhythms, and increasing deployment experience. This role is not about reinventing what already works, but about professionalizing and scaling the existing foundations. A central part of your mandate will be ensuring that engineering processes, structures, and practices are designed to support scalability while enabling the team to grow in size, complexity, and deployment scope without losing speed or quality. While Project roles focus on delivery execution within our ongoing technical projects , this role focuses on strengthening the people, structure, capacity planning, and engineering system that enable sustainable, predictable delivery at scale. You will balance strong technical credibility with people leadership, organizational design, and process improvement. Acting as a close partner to the CTO and COO, you will help ensure engineering operates as a cohesive, high-performing system during a critical scale-up phase. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES - Lead and manage a multidisciplinary team of software, hardware, and embedded engineers, including mentoring junior engineers and interns. - Strengthen and evolve the engineering organization structure, ensuring clear ownership, accountability, and healthy team dynamics. - Ensure engineering capacity planning and project staffing align with company priorities and delivery commitments. - Strengthen and evolve engineering processes to support scalability across development and field operations. - Oversee strategic initiatives that elevate effective hardware–software integration and system-level performance across deployed solutions. - Collaborate closely with Product, Operations, and CTO by translating product requirements into actionable engineering plans. - Collaborate closely with DevOps and IT Infrastructure to Introduce and adapt pragmatic Agile practices, CI/CD pipelines, and quality controls appropriate to the company’s growth stage. - Support deployed systems by acting as an escalation point for complex technical is…