Director Of Autonomy (Robotics)

TL;DR

Director of Autonomy (Robotics): Leading the end-to-end autonomy organization, managing teams across perception, prediction, planning, controls, and localization with an accent on technical strategy and production-scale execution. Focus on building and scaling the autonomy stack for real-world airport environments, ensuring safety-critical performance, and driving the roadmap to remove the safety driver.

Location: Hybrid in South San Francisco; Remote in New York City, Seattle, and Toronto.

Salary: $300,000 – $350,000

Company

hirify.global is a Series A startup transforming ground handling operations in aviation through autonomous driving technology.

What you will do

• Own the entire autonomy stack technically and organizationally, including perception, prediction, planning, controls, and localization.
• Set and execute the multi-year technical roadmap and architectural direction.
• Manage, hire, and scale the autonomy team, including senior and staff-level engineers.
• Serve as the primary interface to systems, safety, hardware, and product teams to manage cross-functional trade-offs.
• Maintain technical depth by participating in design reviews and debugging complex system issues.

Requirements

• 15+ years of hands-on experience building production autonomy systems.
• Proven track record of shipping autonomy components on real vehicles at scale.
• Direct management experience of an autonomy or robotics team of 15+ engineers.
• Fluency in modern deep learning for autonomy and distributed systems (ROS/ROS 2).
• Strong software engineering fundamentals in C++ and Python.
• Experience with safety-critical systems (ISO 26262, ISO 13849, or aerospace equivalents).

Nice to have

• Experience operating in environments with human interaction or unstructured traffic.
• Familiarity with simulation-driven verification and CI/CD pipelines for autonomy.

Culture & Benefits

• Opportunity to work on a concrete commercial deployment with a clear path to scaling.
• Impactful role in a high-growth aviation autonomy startup.
• Equity compensation package.