Vehicle Autonomy Lead
About Us
Havoc is a leader in all-domain collaborative autonomy. Its software-defined hardware approach powers military and commercial-grade autonomous systems across sea, air, and land to sense, decide, and act together in complex and contested environments. Havoc connects assets, enabling them to share information, adapt in real time, and continue operating even when communications are disrupted or denied. Havoc optimizes mission performance and minimizes human risk. Havoc was founded in 2024 and headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island.
About The Role
As the Vehicle Autonomy Team Lead, you will lead the team responsible for building, integrating, and fielding the on-vehicle autonomy stack for HavocAI’s autonomous surface vessels. This role is senior technical leadership for someone with deep experience in robotics, autonomy software, motion planning, controls, vehicle behavior, and real-world system integration.
Key Responsibilities
Lead the technical execution of the on-vehicle autonomy team
Own autonomy capabilities that run onboard autonomous surface vessels, including navigation, planning, control, behaviors, safety logic, and autonomy execution
Define technical priorities, architecture, interfaces, and development standards for vehicle autonomy systems
Guide autonomy design decisions across reliability, latency, safety, compute constraints, mission performance, and field maintainability
Ensure the vehicle autonomy stack is robust, observable, testable, and ready for real-world maritime operations
Team Leadership & Technical Mentorship
Lead, mentor, and support a team of autonomy, robotics, planning, and controls engineers
Provide technical guidance through design reviews, architecture reviews, code reviews, test planning, and field-readiness reviews
Establish strong engineering practices for autonomy development, integration, simulation, testing, and deployment
Create a team culture built on ownership, technical excellence, mission focus, and fast iteration
Integration, Testing & Field Deployment
Drive autonomy capabilities from concept through implementation, simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, field testing, and deployment
Support vessel integration, field tests, customer demonstrations, and operational evaluations
Diagnose and resolve autonomy issues using logs, telemetry, vehicle data, simulation results, and field observations
Build feedback loops between field failures, autonomy improvements, and product roadmap decisions
Ensure the team delivers autonomy software that can be operated, debugged, and maintained in real mission environments
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Work closely with perception, mission software, embedded systems, hardware, product, program, and field operations teams
Translate mission needs and product requirements into vehicle autonomy capabilities
Coordinate interfaces between onboard autonomy, mission planning, command and control, sensors, and platform systems
Communicate technical risks, tradeoffs, and progress clearly to engineering and company leadership
Help align vehicle autonomy development with customer needs, deployment timelines, and long-term product strategy
Qualifications
Bachelor’s degree in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related technical field
8+ years of experience in robotics, autonomy, autonomous vehicles, unmanned systems, maritime autonomy, aerospace, defense technology, or related technical fields
Strong technical background in vehicle autonomy, motion planning, controls, robotics software, and autonomous system integration
Prior experience leading engineers from a technical perspective, either as a team lead, technical lead, staff engineer, principal engineer, or engineering manager
Experience building and deploying autonomy software on real robotic or autonomous systems
Strong understanding of autonomy software stacks, including planning, control, behaviors, state estimation, sensor integration, simulation, testing, and deployment
Strong programming skills in C++ and/or Python
Able to make sound technical tradeoffs across reliability, safety, performance, maintainability, and schedule
Strong debugging skills across software, hardware, sensors, logs, telemetry, and field operations
Excellent communication skills and ability to align technical and non-technical stakeholders
High ownership, strong judgment, and comfort operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments
Passion for mission-critical autonomy and real-world robotic systems
U.S. citizenship and ability to obtain and maintain a security clearance
Preferred Skills
Experience with autonomous surface vessels, maritime autonomy, naval systems, unmanned boats, or maritime domain awareness
Experience with collision avoidance, COLREGs-aware planning, path planning, trajectory generation, behavior planning, guidance, navigation, or control systems
Experience with multi-agent autonomy, collaborative autonomy, distributed robotic systems, or coordinated vehicle behaviors
Experience with ROS2, DDS, MOOS-IvP, autonomy middleware, or distributed robotics architectures
Experience integrating perception, radar, EO/IR cameras, AIS, GPS/INS, or other maritime sensor modalities into autonomy systems
Experience with simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, autonomy verification and validation, and field test programs
Experience supporting government, DoD, defense, or dual-use technology programs
Experience operating in startup or fast-moving product engineering environments