Alphabet-Owned Drone Co Fuels Expansion With Hiring

Alphabet-owned drone company Wing is looking to hire at least 24 people to expand the company in an increasingly competitive field, according to a report by CNBC.

Wing wants to expand its delivery service in the United States and other countries as well. The company started as part of Alphabet’s experimental research arm called Google X, and it has fewer than 200 people working for it.

The company wants to hire people to help it grow into new regions, help with the regulation of air delivery and find new business partners.

To fill these needs, Wing wants to expand its legal team by hiring a product counsel and a regulation lead to help foster company agendas with air regulators. There are specific issues with privacy and other regulations that drone companies have to deal with while they grow.

The company also posted listings for a chief pilot, engineers and operations managers.

Wing wants to deliver things like medicine, food and coffee in as little as minutes, and it’s also trying to create software that can handle multiple drone deliveries for other parties.

Wing is also notable for being the first drone company to get Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approval, which means the company was allowed to deliver to some cities in Virginia.

Wing partnered with Virginia Tech and the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership as a part of the Transportation Department’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program, which was created to speed up drone integration and aid with the drafting of FAA rules around drones.

However, competition in the space was recently heightened when Amazon also got FAA approval for its own drones for Prime delivery, less than two months after Wing. Amazon said its drones could be ready in as soon as a few months.

Wing wants to expand delivery too but it hasn’t released a timeline or a concrete plan to do so.