Engineering Manager, Autonomy (Spacecraft AI)

Location: Onsite near Denver, Colorado or Long Beach, California, United States

Base salary: $205,000–$315,000 per year, plus equity and benefits.

Company

hirify.global develops autonomous spacecraft, advanced payloads, mission software, and space-based interceptors for U.S. and allied space operations.

What you will do

• Build, grow, and lead a team of autonomy engineers through hiring, onboarding, performance management, and career development.
• Provide technical direction for multi-agent coordination, combinatorial optimization, stochastic planning, distributed protocols, and edge AI deployment.
• Own the team roadmap across constellation scheduling, onboard replanning, proximity operations, multi-spacecraft coordination, and anomaly detection agents.
• Coordinate delivery with hardware, trajectory planning, flight software, technical program management, and autonomy leadership.
• Define autonomy standards, explainability requirements, validation approaches, and real-time performance trade-offs for high-stakes spacecraft systems.
• Drive execution from research prototypes through flight demonstrations, customer test campaigns, and production-ready operational systems.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in autonomous systems, robotics, AI/ML, or aerospace engineering, including at least 4 years of people management.
• Experience leading teams of 4 or more engineers and building high-performing engineering organizations.
• Master’s degree in computer science, aerospace engineering, robotics, applied mathematics, operations research, or a related technical field; a Ph.D. or equivalent professional experience with a bachelor’s degree is also accepted.
• Strong technical foundation in autonomous systems, including multi-agent coordination, combinatorial optimization, reinforcement learning, or constrained planning.
• Experience with real-time planning, resource-constrained deployment, or aerospace applications operating under strict compute, latency, and power constraints.
• Must be a U.S. citizen and eligible for a government security clearance or meet applicable ITAR authorization requirements.

Nice to have

• Experience managing distributed or hybrid teams and leading full product development lifecycles.
• Background in autonomous aerospace systems, UAVs, spacecraft autonomy, or robotics.
• Experience with operations research, multi-agent reinforcement learning, edge AI deployment, stochastic optimization, trajectory optimization, or hierarchical planning.
• Experience bridging research prototypes to scalable, reliable production systems and coordinating hardware/software integration.
• Experience with agile methodologies, resource planning, capacity modeling, and headcount justification.

Culture & Benefits

• Health, dental, vision, and HRA/HSA options.
• Paid time off, paid holidays, parental leave, and 401(k).
• Equity participation.
• Culture focused on creativity, ambitious problem-solving, technical excellence, and collaboration.