Director of Autonomy (Robotics)

Location: United States or Canada — San Francisco, Toronto, New York, or Seattle

Company

A Series A company developing autonomous ground-handling systems for airlines and ground service providers.

What you will do

• Lead the autonomy organization across perception, prediction, planning, controls, and localization.
• Define and own the multi-year technical roadmap and architectural direction.
• Manage the autonomy team, establish its structure, hire senior talent, and oversee delivery.
• Coordinate autonomy decisions with Systems, Safety, Platform, Hardware, Simulation, and Product.
• Participate in design reviews, challenge technical decisions, and debug complex autonomy problems.

Requirements

• 15+ years of hands-on experience building production autonomy systems across multiple modules.
• Experience shipping autonomy components on real vehicles at meaningful scale.
• Directly managed an autonomy or robotics team of 15+ engineers, including senior and staff-level individual contributors.
• Experience owning an autonomy stack and operating its planning, prioritization, technical review, and performance-management cadence.
• Practical knowledge of deep-learning model training, evaluation, deployment, and lifecycle management for real-world autonomy.
• Experience with ROS or ROS 2 and distributed on-vehicle computing, including real-time constraints, IPC, and fault containment.

Nice to have

• Strong software engineering skills in C++ and Python.
• Experience with safety-critical or functional-safety systems, including ISO 26262, ISO 13849, SOTIF, or aerospace equivalents.
• Experience with human interaction, mixed traffic, or unstructured environments within an Operational Design Domain.
• Familiarity with simulation-driven verification and simulation in CI/CD pipelines.

Culture & Benefits

• Hands-on senior leadership role with continued involvement in technical design and implementation.
• Commercial autonomy deployment in airport environments with real operational constraints.
• Defined path toward removing the safety driver and scaling the vehicle fleet.
• Direct reporting line to the VP of Engineering.