Director of Autonomy

Job description

WHO WE ARE AeroVect is transforming ground handling with autonomy, redefining how airlines and ground service providers around the globe run day-to-day operations. We are a Series A company backed by top-tier venture capital investors in aviation and autonomous driving. Our customers include some of the world’s largest airlines and ground handling providers. For more information, visit www.aerovect.com http://www.aerovect.com. We are hiring a Director of Autonomy to lead our autonomy organization end-to-end. You will manage the entire autonomy team (Perception, Prediction, Planning, Controls, and Localization), own the technical direction across the stack, and be accountable for both the technical roadmap and the team that delivers it. You will report directly to the VP of Engineering. This is a hands-on leadership role. We are looking for a leader who is excellent both at the systems level and at execution — someone with deep technical credibility who is also strong at managing, hiring, and scaling an autonomy organization. YOU WILL 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. - Stay technical. This is not a hands-off leadership role. You are expected to be in design reviews, to push back on technical decisions with substance, and to credibly debug the hardest problems with the team. YOU HAVE - 15+ years of hands-on experience building production autonomy systems, with strong technical depth across multiple modules (localization, perception, prediction, planning, controls). You think at the level of the autonomy system, not a single module. - 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. You have hired, leveled, and grown autonomy talent before. - 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. - Demonstrated 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. WE PREFER - Strong software engineering fundamentals in C++ and Python. You write or review code that other senior engineers want to extend and trust in a safety-relevant system. - 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. WHY THIS ROLE AT AEROVECT? - A real ODD with real constraints. Airports are one of the few environments where commercial autonomy is genuinely viable today and where the path to removing the safety driver is concrete rather than speculative. - Scope. This is the senior autonomy leadership role at AeroVect. You own the entire stack and the team that builds it. - A defined path to scale, not a science project. A real commercial deployment with a concrete path to removing the safety driver and scaling the fleet. Your work has a destination.