Director of Autonomy

About the role

The Director of Autonomy will lead the autonomy organization end-to-end, managing the entire autonomy stack, from Perception to Controls, and owning the technical direction across the stack. They will set and own the multi-year technical roadmap, build the org structure, hire the senior talent, run the operating cadence, and be accountable for delivering against the company's autonomy roadmap.

Responsibilities

• Own the entire autonomy stack — Perception, Prediction, Planning, Controls, and Localization — end-to-end, technically and organizationally.
• Technical strategy: Set and own the multi-year technical roadmap for the autonomy stack, including the long-term architectural direction across modular and end-to-end approaches.
• Team and execution: Manage the autonomy team across all modules. Build the org structure, hire the senior talent, run the operating cadence, and be accountable for delivery against the company's autonomy roadmap.
• Cross-functional ownership: Be the primary autonomy interface to Systems, Safety, Platform, Hardware, Simulation, and Product. Own the trade-offs that span the boundary between autonomy and the rest of the company.

Requirements

15+ years of hands-on experience building production autonomy systems, with strong technical depth across multiple modules (localization, perception, prediction, planning, controls).

Demonstrated track record of shipping autonomy components that have run in production on real vehicles at non-trivial scale — not just research prototypes or simulation results.

Direct management experience of an autonomy or robotics team of 15+ engineers, including senior and staff-level ICs.

Track record of running the operating cadence of an autonomy organization — planning, prioritization, technical reviews, performance management — without losing the technical edge that makes the team trust you.

End-to-end ownership of an autonomy stack.

Fluency with modern deep learning for autonomy, including the practical realities of training, evaluation, deployment, and lifecycle management of models that have to work in the real world.

Experience working in or with ROS / ROS 2 and the distributed-systems realities of on-vehicle compute (real-time constraints, IPC, fault containment).

A bias for execution. You ship. You close out problems. You convert ambiguity into a plan and the plan into running code on a vehicle.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals in C++ and Python.
• Experience with safety-critical or functional-safety-relevant systems (ISO 26262, ISO 13849, SOTIF, or aerospace equivalents).
• Experience operating in an Operational Design Domain that involves heavy interaction with humans, mixed traffic, or unstructured environments.
• Familiarity with simulation-driven verification and the use of simulation as part of a CI/CD pipeline for autonomy.

Skills

Deep technical credibility, excellent both at the systems level and at execution.

Benefits

Compensation Range: $350K - $500K