How best to hire Drone Developer?

I am starting a well funded company related to security and autonomous flight drones. I am not a developer and need to hire a CTO or Lead Developer, who can build a team, who is familiar with the right APIs and Flight Control systems and most flexible development language.

Where is the best place to place a posting for the position or reach out to contractors or consultants? I have used upwork.com in past but not sure that is right for a specialty like Drone programming. Thanks for any help or guidance!

Directly advertising here isn’t a bad option.
A good alternative is to directly contact someone from the list here: http://ardupilot.org/ardupilot/docs/common-commercial-support.html

If neither of those options work for your venture, feel free to PM me with details and I can ask around.

Hi John,

Finding the right CTO is always an extremely difficult thing to do and I can not help you here. When you get to the larger team I would encourage you to engage the relevant expertise through the commercial support page. In general you will find that you will get a better outcome in a MUCH shorter time frame and at a lower total cost. Working closely with the developers like this is a great way to train and educate your employees and in doing so slowly reduce your dependence on developers directly.

This general approach provides a fast and cost effective path to the production of your product or service while giving you time to train and grow your workforce. It also establishes a strong relationship and line of communication with the developer community.

As your workforce maturers it is also very advantageous to embed an employee in the dev team or directly support a developer that is closely aligned with your product.

I hope this helps,
Leonard

In case it’s helpful, here is a link to the commercial support page. It’s a bit hard to find this page but from the main ardupilot.org side, click on the “Community” menu and it’s about the 7th entry down. I’ve been looking to move it to a more obvious place but haven’t figured out where yet.

Hi John
What part of the world are you located in?

South Florida. US.

John