Manager, Autonomy Evaluation, Data & Test (Drones)

Location: Torrance, California, United States

Salary: $191,500–$268,000 USD per year, plus equity consideration.

Company

hirify.global is a defense technology company designing and manufacturing unmanned systems for contested environments and large-scale deployment.

What you will do

• Own autonomy software release criteria, regression gates, build-blocking conditions, and exception reviews.
• Define autonomy performance metrics and publish coverage and reliability reporting for engineering and company leadership.
• Build and operate multi-tier regression infrastructure covering unit and module tests, logged-flight replay, closed-loop simulation, and hardware-in-the-loop testing.
• Own the autonomy data platform, including vehicle data capture, field egress, ingestion, normalization, log cataloging, querying, deterministic replay, and versioned datasets.
• Direct field testing and autonomy integration, including instrumented test articles, payload integration, range operations, log recovery, and flight-readiness execution.
• Hire, lead, and develop engineers across software infrastructure, data engineering, simulation, and physical test.

Requirements

• 8+ years of engineering experience in robotics, autonomous vehicles, aerospace, or defense autonomy, including 3+ years managing engineers.
• Experience leading evaluation, validation, metrics, or test infrastructure for a physical autonomous system.
• Experience defining autonomy or machine learning performance metrics, acceptance criteria, and release-gating decisions.
• Hands-on experience building automated regression and CI infrastructure in Python and C++.
• Experience with large-scale log and sensor-data infrastructure, time alignment, multi-terabyte video and telemetry data, cataloging, querying, and deterministic replay.
• Working knowledge of closed-loop simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, embedded latency budgets, and timing measurement, plus a relevant bachelor's or master's degree.

Nice to have

• Experience building evaluation, simulation, or data infrastructure from the ground up at an autonomous vehicle, drone, or robotics company.
• Experience with machine learning data pipelines, dataset versioning and lineage, labeling operations, and automated model evaluation.
• Experience supporting flight tests, range operations, instrumented test articles, turnaround processes, and flight-readiness reviews.
• Background in guidance, navigation and control, multi-target tracking, sensor fusion, or electro-optical and infrared perception.

Culture & Benefits

• Fast-paced, hands-on environment focused on moving autonomy capabilities from design to deployment.
• Work on unmanned systems tested in combat and designed for contested operating environments.
• Competitive equity grants are considered part of total compensation.