Las Vegas, NV
We hire contract, part-time, and full-time.
About the pilot bench, first
Our pilots come from competition aerobatics, not commercial drone certification — manual and acro flying without GPS or altitude assist, fixed-wing and rotary, FPV, live-event experience, and a documented competition record. That is a narrow bench and we are honest about it: most people who write to us about flying do not clear it, and it is not the only way in.
Everything below is a different door.
What you’d work on
Autonomy and behavior. Twelve aircraft, not twelve pilots. You write the behavior that keeps them apart and makes the show run itself.
Flight choreography. The audience watches from one seat, not from above. Composing for that is a design problem before it is a flight problem.
Previsualization. We fly the show in a digital twin first, so a bad idea costs an afternoon instead of a rehearsal.
Tracking and sensing. GPS stops at the door. Cameras and radio track every craft inside. We also rent large-volume OptiTrack with operators, which is a job of its own.
Show operations. Autonomy flies the show, and every system degrades gracefully to a hand on the sticks. The crew runs comms, checks, and the call to hold.
If you are coming from aviation
We want to be straight about this, because getting it wrong wastes your time. Flying an MQ-9 is not flying a 100-gram helium craft indoors, and we are not going to pretend your stick time transfers. What does transfer is the part that is hardest to teach: radio discipline, checklists, briefing and debriefing, the patience to hold, and the willingness to call a stop in front of an audience.
At Tate Modern we flew twelve aircraft eight hours a day for four months — more than 13,000 aircraft-hours over live audiences. That is not a thrill-seeking job. It is an endurance and discipline job, and people who have run real operations tend to be good at it.
What we build and where
The autonomy behind the flying sculptures at Tate Modern and the New Museum was designed, built, and operated in-house, in Las Vegas. The methods were peer-reviewed at SIGGRAPH. We are a Sitara Systems venture, and the studio’s commitments on design ethics, pay, and AI apply here too — including the published pay floor we hold ourselves to even when a freelancer quotes below it.