Director of Autonomy (Robotics)

TL;DR

Director of Autonomy (Robotics): Leading the end-to-end autonomy organization to transform airport ground handling with an accent on technical strategy, team scaling, and production-grade deployment. Focus on owning the full autonomy stack (Perception, Prediction, Planning, Controls, and Localization) and shipping safety-critical systems for real-world vehicles.

Location: Hybrid in South San Francisco, or Remote in New York City, Seattle, or Toronto

Salary: $300,000 – $350,000 + Equity

Company

hirify.global is a Series A company redefining airport ground handling through autonomy and autonomous driving.

What you will do

• Lead the autonomy organization end-to-end, managing teams across Perception, Prediction, Planning, Controls, and Localization.
• Set and own the multi-year technical roadmap and architectural direction across modular and end-to-end approaches.
• Scale the organization by hiring senior talent and managing the operating cadence for a team of 15+ engineers.
• Act as the primary autonomy interface for Systems, Safety, Platform, Hardware, Simulation, and Product teams.
• Maintain hands-on technical involvement in design reviews and debug the most complex system problems.

Requirements

• 15+ years of hands-on experience building production autonomy systems with depth across multiple modules.
• Proven track record of shipping autonomy components on real vehicles at non-trivial scale.
• Direct management experience of autonomy or robotics teams with 15+ engineers, including senior and staff ICs.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals in C++ and Python.
• Fluency with modern deep learning for autonomy, including training, evaluation, and deployment of real-world models.
• Location: Must be based in the US (SF, NYC, Seattle) or Canada (Toronto).

Nice to have

• Experience with safety-critical systems (ISO 26262, ISO 13849, SOTIF, or aerospace equivalents).
• Experience operating in ODDs involving heavy human interaction or unstructured environments.
• Familiarity with simulation-driven verification and CI/CD pipelines for autonomy.
• Experience with ROS / ROS 2 and on-vehicle compute constraints.

Culture & Benefits

• Opportunity to work on a concrete path to removing safety drivers in a viable commercial environment.
• High-impact senior leadership role with ownership of the entire autonomy stack.
• Backed by top-tier venture capital investors in aviation and autonomous driving.