Director of Software Engineering, Behaviors and Planning

About the Role

Overland AI builds autonomous ground vehicles for defense and national security missions. Our Behaviors & Planning team owns the final layer of single-vehicle autonomy: using terrain understanding to generate planned paths and execute behaviors. This is the core autonomy loop that makes our vehicles move safely and reliably across operational domains ranging from secondary roads to complex off-road terrain.

What You'll Do

• Lead the team. Manage, mentor, and grow a team of 7-10 engineers spanning planning, behaviors, and verification. Run sprint planning and set technical priorities. Build a team culture that values engineering rigor and field-validated results.
• Own the autonomy loop. Drive the technical direction for single-vehicle autonomous movement: local and mid-range planning (MPPI, costmap-based approaches), global/geospatial planning, behavior management (teleop, autonomous modes, trail-keeping, convoy following), and task interfaces. Ensure the system is safe, performant, and reliable across our full operational design domain.
• Close the loop with perception. Your primary technical partnership is with our ML & Perception team. Perception provides terrain understanding products (ground surface prediction, costmap prediction, dynamic object prediction); your team consumes these to plan and execute. You will co-own the contract between these teams and drive tighter integration as we move toward end-to-end learned planning approaches.
• Build the verification story. Own offline verification of autonomy requirements through simulation, log playback, and automated regression testing. The team that writes behaviors also proves they work. You will invest in tooling and infrastructure that lets your team catch regressions before they reach vehicles.
• Push the frontier. Explore and integrate emerging capabilities such as VLM-based reasoning for behavioral guardrails, scene understanding, and contextual decision-making. This is the per-vehicle intelligence that enables effective multi-robot orchestration at the mission level.
• Represent autonomy in the field. Support field deployments and customer demonstrations. Understand soldier workflows and operational needs firsthand. Translate field observations into engineering priorities.

Nice to Have

• Experience with off-road or unstructured terrain navigation (not just highway/urban AV)
• Familiarity with ROS2 or similar robotics middleware
• Background in machine learning for planning or perception-planning integration (learned cost functions, end-to-end planning, foundation models for robotics)
• Experience with geospatial planning, satellite imagery-based route planning, or GIS data for autonomy
• Prior work in defense, government contracting, or DoD customer engagement
• Experience building simulation and log-replay verification systems for autonomous vehicles

Security Clearance

Must be a U.S. Person, as defined under ITAR, and eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance. Active Secret clearance is preferred but not required at the time of hire.

Compensation & Benefits

• The base salary range for this role is $200,000 – $300,000, depending on experience and qualifications.
• Generous equity compensation
• 401(k) with company match
• Best-in-class healthcare, dental, and vision plans
• Flexible PTO
• Parental leave

Software Engineering

Seattle, WA