Principal Engineer for Autonomy (Robotics)

TL;DR

Principal Engineer for Autonomy (Robotics): Designing and owning the perception, prediction, and planning stacks for autonomous ground support equipment in airport environments with an accent on production-grade shipping and cross-stack architecture. Focus on converting complex autonomy decisions into running code on vehicles and ensuring system robustness across real-world operating conditions.

Location: Hybrid in South San Francisco or Seattle; Remote in New York City, Toronto, or other remote options

Salary: $300K – $350K + Equity (San Francisco)

Company

hirify.global is a Series A startup transforming ground handling with autonomy for airlines and ground service providers globally.

What you will do

• Own the design and evolution of the perception stack, including detection, classification, tracking, and multi-modal sensor fusion.
• Lead the prediction stack and the design of models for intent inference and behavior forecasting.
• Design the planning and decision-making stack for domain-specific autonomous GSE operations.
• Set the technical direction at the interfaces between autonomy modules to ensure system coherence end-to-end.
• Own the functional and software architecture of the autonomy stack.

Requirements

• 15+ years of hands-on experience building production autonomy systems across multiple modules.
• Demonstrated track record of shipping autonomy components on real vehicles at non-trivial scale.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals in C++ and Python.
• Fluency with modern deep learning for autonomy, including training, evaluation, and deployment.
• Experience working with ROS / ROS 2 and on-vehicle compute constraints (real-time, IPC).
• Experience as the senior-most IC, setting direction and mentoring other senior engineers.

Nice to have

• Experience with safety-critical systems (ISO 26262, ISO 13849, SOTIF).
• Experience in ODDs involving heavy human interaction or unstructured environments.
• Familiarity with simulation-driven verification within CI/CD pipelines.

Culture & Benefits

• Opportunity to work in a real ODD where commercial autonomy is genuinely viable.
• High-impact role as the senior-most technical voice across the autonomy organization.
• Defined path to commercial scale and removal of safety drivers.
• Backed by top-tier venture capital investors in aviation and autonomous driving.