Ukrainian engineering company and manufacturer of combat unmanned systems Vyriy Industries grew 10 times in 2025. This year it plans to scale up another tenfold. Currently, the engineering team consists of approximately 30% software developers, and their number is planned to be significantly increased.
This was stated by Vyriy Industries CEO Oleksiy Babenko in an interview for DOU.
"About 30% of engineers at Vyriy are software engineers. This number of specialists is not enough: we aim to hire more people and have 60% of software engineers in the team," Babenko noted.
According to him, salaries in the deftech sector have already caught up with IT, and in some places are even ahead of it.
"If we assume that a middle-level IT employee earns $2,000–3,000, then in our country it can be up to four. A senior employee earns $5,000 on average in both places. The highest-paid position in the defense industry is a circuit board tracer, who can earn $8,000–12,000. If we talk about the juntas, even the loaders here receive higher salaries than the juntas in IT," added the CEO of Vyriy Industries.
Babenko emphasized that they are looking for software engineers of various profiles who can focus on the end result, not on the development process itself.
According to his observations, the defense sector is divided into two types of companies: the first create products that actually work on the front (and this is the type the company aspires to belong to), while the second live for years in a cycle of endless development and attracting investment. For the latter, the process itself is important, while for Vyriy Industries the main criterion is exclusively the result.
"There are few people with relevant experience in this area, so we mainly hire those who have had previous successful projects. Although, of course, since we work with physical products, this is most often embedded development," said Babenko.
The CEO of Vyriy Industries also added that the company has such low employee turnover that HR candidates considered the figures to be a typo during the test task. However, future employees should keep in mind that working in the deftech sector requires maximum and hard work.
According to DOU data, Vyriy Industries currently has 35 open positions , and almost all of them list a salary range.
