Head of Autonomy

You will own the autonomy stack from sensors through actuation and set its technical direction. You will lead engineering across perception, simulation, controls, planning, fleet orchestration, learning-based autonomy, and MLOps. You will make architecture decisions, review designs and code, scale deployments across vehicle types and sites, establish safety release gates, and hire, coach, and manage technical leaders and engineers.

Responsibilities

• Own the autonomy architecture from sensors to actuation
• Set the roadmap for classical and learning-based autonomy methods
• Develop composable material-manipulation skills across machine types
• Build simulation, data capture, evaluation, and regression-testing systems
• Scale autonomy for multi-machine fleets and remote-operator coordination
• Reduce autonomy integration time for new vehicle models
• Define autonomy safety cases and release gates
• Manage, hire, develop, and coach the autonomy engineering organization
• Set engineering goals, priorities, and quality standards
• Represent autonomy to executives, customers, and partners

Requirements

• Master's degree or Ph.D. in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical or Mechanical Engineering, a related field, or equivalent experience
• 10+ years building autonomy or robotics software
• At least 5 years managing engineering teams, including managers or technical leads
• Experience shipping autonomy on physical robots or vehicles in real operating conditions
• Hands-on expertise in at least two autonomy domains, with full-stack fluency
• Experience with imitation learning, reinforcement learning, or large pretrained models
• Experience with data and evaluation infrastructure tied to field performance
• Strong C++ and Python skills
• Experience deploying autonomy and ML models on embedded compute
• Track record of hiring and developing engineers
• Ability to work on-site in Palo Alto and at field locations
• U.S. citizenship or lawful permanent residency due to export controls