Chief Engineer – UAV Systems (Head of Defence Engineering)

IZI Ventures is the defence and strategic systems arm of the IZI group, headquartered in Bhopal. We design and build unmanned aerial systems for the Indian armed forces, paramilitary forces, and government agencies — with a technology core in GPS-denied navigation, jam-resistant communications, and autonomous flight. The group's established consumer electronics business provides manufacturing, supply chain, and financial depth; the defence vertical is our strategic growth engine, aligned with Aatmanirbhar Bharat.

The Role

The senior-most engineering position in our defence business — the technical authority for everything we build. You own the system architecture, the technical baseline, and the engineering organisation behind our lead platform: VANA, a GPS-denied-capable ISR multirotor in micro and small classes with tethered operation. You make the engineering calls — architecture, design freezes, vendor down-selects, make/buy — and you are accountable for taking VANA from development through flight test to a successful demonstration before a defence end-user evaluation. The founder sets direction; the engineering organisation, its decisions, and its output are yours. This is a builder's role: the team, the test discipline, and the first fielded-quality system are yours to create.

What You Will Own

- System architecture and technical baseline: airframe/propulsion trade-offs, avionics and flight control stack, GPS-denied navigation integration, EW-resilient datalinks, payload and tether subsystems, GCS software — with requirements, configuration control, and design freezes decided on evidence, on deadline

- Engineering decisions: authority over vendor/component down-selects (sensors, payloads, GNSS/INS, compute, propulsion), make/buy calls, and resource allocation — run through a decision-log discipline where nothing stays open past deadline

- Flight test and demonstration: test planning, data review, failure investigation, airworthiness sign-off — and a rehearsed, dated path to end-user evaluation

- Certification: DGCA UAS frameworks; DGQA/CEMILAC readiness and MIL-STD environmental/EMI-EMC expectations for military variants

- The team: hiring sign-off and technical evaluation for every engineering role across navigation, datalinks, autonomy, embedded, airframe, payload, GCS, and flight test — building an organisation of 15–20

Who We Are Looking For

- 8–15 years in UAV, aerospace, or defence systems engineering, with 5+ years leading multidisciplinary engineering teams — and still technically sharp: this is an engineering chair, not a coordination chair

- Hands-on depth in at least two of: flight controls and firmware (PX4/ArduPilot), avionics and sensor integration, airframe/propulsion design, embedded systems

- A demonstrated record of taking a complex aerospace or robotics system from development through flight test to delivery or induction — you have shipped and flown hardware, not only designed it

- Backgrounds we expect to fit: chief engineer / engineering leadership at HAL, ADE, or DRDO labs; senior engineering leadership at Indian UAV companies; or Armed Forces technical-branch officers with UAV development exposure

- Working knowledge of DGQA / CEMILAC / MIL-STD regimes and DGCA UAS frameworks

- A decision-maker by temperament: closes calls on incomplete information, on deadline, and owns the outcome

- B.E./B.Tech required; M.Tech/MS preferred

Compensation

Competitive with senior defence-industry engineering leadership: fixed CTC plus milestone-linked components. Relocation support to Bhopal provided.

• All conversations held in strict confidence.