World 4 · My first job
Aereo hangar
About 20 months at Aereo, a drone company in Bengaluru.
Intern from December 2024. Full-time systems engineer from July 2025. It was my first company, and it started my career in drones.
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A stranger on LinkedIn
In my final year I cold mailed drone companies. For a few weeks there was no response. I was scared.
I had opted out of the campus placement cell, so campus companies were not an option. One drone company did call back, but it felt like they were selling a training program. I said no to the only call I had.
Cold mailing was not working, so I tried something different. I messaged people on LinkedIn who had the job I wanted, and I asked one of them what a systems engineer does.
To this day he has never answered that question. He asked for my resume instead. He took my interview himself, and he was my manager for my entire time at Aereo.
What I did there
- Led a battery management project from testing off-the-shelf boards through to a finished prototype with the team.
- Built a method to estimate battery health from several measurements.
- Built and flew a test drone used to try new sensors and computers before they went on production aircraft. Wrote up the flight data and reports.
- Worked on propulsion upgrades and electromagnetic interference testing.
- Did a lot of root cause analyses: reading the flight logs to find why something went wrong.
Kept vague on purpose. The details belong to Aereo.
The crash I thought was my fault
1 / 8
The first hover
We had a prototype with a new propulsion system. I flew the R&D drones, so I took it to the field. First a short take off and landing, to look for wobble. There was a little. It was controllable, so I landed.
2 / 8
My mistake
On the second flight the pitch was reversed. Stick forward pitched it back. That one was on me.
3 / 8
The crash
Then it locked into one pitch angle. I gave a counter input, it started to oscillate and stopped responding. It rolled on the ground and crashed. I thought I had lost control because of the reversed pitch.
4 / 8
My sticks
Back at base we went through the log. My stick inputs were small. Nothing in them could have done that.
5 / 8
The motors
The motor outputs were violent. The sticks only give direction. The flight controller does the stabilising, and it was fighting hard.
6 / 8
The motion sensor
The motion sensor showed a lot of noise and wobble, when the drone had actually not been wobbling that much. The controller was correcting for movement that was not there.
7 / 8
Inside the frame
We opened the drone. The motion sensor had come loose from its mount and was hanging in mid air inside the frame.
8 / 8
Proving the fix
We remounted it and tried to shake it loose by hand on the ground. Then a test flight. We checked every log after it, and opened the drone again to see the sensor still in place. I fixed the stick reversal too. The next flights were fine.
Why it mattered
For an intern to get so many roles, the freedom to suggest improvements and the chance to work with the leaders is what made me want a startup and not a corporate.
It was with a heavy heart that I left, to build myself further in robotics and drones.
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