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We are seeking an experienced Autonomous Warfare Technical Director to lead the strategic development, technical execution, and integration of next-generation autonomous warfare capabilities supporting Defense Innovation Unit (DIU). The Technical Director shapes portfolio strategy, evaluates technologies and architectures, helps establish engineering standards, identifies and mitigates technical risks and hazards, and works directly with Program Managers, operators, program offices, and commercial engineering teams to execute these responsibilities.
The ideal candidate understands that successful demonstrations are not the same as deployable products. They look beyond nominal performance to reliability, edge cases, integration complexity, operator burden, sustainment, cybersecurity, manufacturing, and continuous improvement.
Technical Leadership Competencies:
• Independently evaluates complex systems and earns credibility with senior engineers. Assesses the full capability rather than isolated components.
• Prioritizes reliability, scalability, maintainability, and repeatable operational performance over impressive demonstrations. • Understands product development, engineering tradeoffs, technical roadmaps, capital constraints, and company incentives.
• Connects technical decisions to mission conditions, user behavior, and the consequences of failure. Duties and Responsibilities • Drives technical execution and shepherding of portfolio programs, takes active ownership of engineering milestones, design reviews, and technical blocker resolution to ensure the successful integration and delivery of autonomous warfare hardware, software, and enabling technologies. • Advise and oversee programs from problem definition and market assessment through testing, transition, and fielding. • Evaluate commercial systems and companies for technical maturity, reliability, differentiation, scalability, integration risk, and operational relevance. • Assess autonomy hardware and software stacks, including sensing, perception, localization, planning, control, communications, compute, data, safety, and human-machine interfaces. • Develop technical requirements, reference architectures, evaluation criteria, test approaches, data strategies, and transition standards. • Ensure testing produces credible evidence on performance, robustness, reliability, safety, usability, interoperability, and mission effectiveness. • Provide subject matter expertise in systems capabilities across land, sea, air, cyber, and space including robotics programs and technology, prototype development, and technology transition, including current and future remote sensing and C5ISR capabilities.
• Work closely with government partners and commercial vendors as a technical manager facilitating non-traditional and/or traditional vendor relationships throughout the prototype development lifecycle.
• Establish connections to academia and early-stage industry to ensure the remains abreast of capabilities that will most influence its direction.
• Lead system architecture for autonomous platforms, intelligent decision-support systems, and human-machine teaming solutions. Required Qualifications Education:
• Bachelor’s degree + 10 years of relevant experience; OR
• Master’s degree + 7 years of relevant experience; OR
• High School Diploma or equivalent and 15 years relevant experience. Skills and Experience:
• Deep expertise in autonomy, robotics, AI, or related fields. • Meaningful commercial or government experience developing and delivering autonomous or robotic products and capabilities. • Experience fielding production-grade systems that operate reliably outside of controlled environments.
• Strong technical judgment across perception, planning, control, communications, compute, data, platforms, and operators. • Experience defining requirements, designing tests, analyzing performance, and making evidence-based technical decisions. • Understanding of production engineering practices, including configuration management, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), reliability, quality assurance, cybersecurity, release processes, risk management, and sustainment. • Ability to communicate effectively with engineers, operators, executives, acquisition professionals, and senior government leaders. • U.S. Citizenship is required. • Possession or the ability to obtain Top Secret (TS/SCI) security clearance.
• Ability to travel 30% of time.
• Location: Mountain View, CA Preferred Qualifications • Experience with unmanned systems, autonomous vehicles, industrial robotics, or other complex cyber-physical systems. • Previously a CTO, chief engineer, engineering director, technical product leader, principal roboticist, or similar role. • Expertise in collaborative autonomy, multi-agent coordination, distributed systems, or human-machine teaming. Deployment of autonomous systems in safety-critical, mission-critical, degraded, or communications-constrained environments. • Experience with simulation, synthetic data, hardware- or software-in-the-loop testing, and continuous verification. • Familiarity with modular open architectures, interoperability standards, data rights, and third-party integration. • Experience assessing manufacturing readiness, supplier quality, producibility, and scaling constraints. • Familiarity with DoW testing, safety, cybersecurity, certification, acquisition, or operational approval processes.