Director of Autonomy (Robotics)

TL;DR

Director of Autonomy (Robotics): Leading the end-to-end autonomy organization including perception, planning, and controls for autonomous ground handling in aviation with an accent on technical strategy and organizational scaling. Focus on shipping production-ready autonomy systems, managing cross-functional trade-offs, and removing safety drivers in real-world airport environments.

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

Salary: $350k – $500k + Equity

Company

hirify.global is a Series A startup transforming airport ground handling through autonomous vehicle technology, backed by top-tier venture capital.

What you will do

• Lead the autonomy organization end-to-end, managing Perception, Prediction, Planning, Controls, and Localization teams.
• Set and own the multi-year technical roadmap and long-term architectural direction across modular and end-to-end approaches.
• Scale the organization by hiring senior talent and establishing a rigorous operating cadence.
• Serve as the primary autonomy interface for Systems, Safety, Platform, Hardware, and Product teams.
• Maintain technical depth by leading design reviews and debugging the hardest problems with the team.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience building production autonomy systems 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.
• Fluency with modern deep learning, including training, evaluation, and deployment in real-world settings.
• Experience with ROS/ROS 2 and distributed systems on-vehicle compute.
• Must be based in the US or Canada.

Nice to have

• Strong software engineering fundamentals in C++ and Python.
• Experience with safety-critical standards such as ISO 26262, ISO 13849, or SOTIF.
• Experience operating in ODDs with heavy human interaction or unstructured environments.
• Familiarity with simulation-driven verification and CI/CD pipelines for autonomy.

Culture & Benefits

• High-impact role owning the entire autonomy stack in a senior leadership capacity.
• Work on a concrete, viable path to removing safety drivers in commercial aviation.
• Opportunity to scale a fleet in a real commercial deployment.
• Backed by top-tier aviation and autonomous driving investors.