- Robot type
- Drone
- Location
- AustinTexasUSA
- Job type
- Business Operations
- Posted
- Mar 30, 2026
Full-time
Autonomy Lead
Job description
This role owns how autonomy works in real-world flight, and it owns the small team that builds it.
You will define how perception, state estimation, planning, and flight behaviors come together into a system that actually completes missions reliably. This is not about building isolated components. It is about making the full stack work under real constraints, and about leading a team of autonomy engineers to do the same.
You will shape how our ML systems improve with real-world data and ensure they perform outside of ideal conditions. You will lead technical direction for autonomy while remaining deeply hands-on in architecture, implementation, testing, and flight debugging.
Job responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end autonomy stack across perception, estimation, planning, and system behavior
- Lead, manage, and grow a team of autonomy engineers, including hiring, onboarding, performance, and development
- Be accountable for your team's output, technical standards, morale, and retention
- Define system architecture and make tradeoffs across reliability, performance, and operational complexity
- Set technical direction for autonomy while remaining hands-on in critical technical areas
- Drive integration across autonomy, GNC, mission planning, and aircraft systems
- Own how autonomy is validated across simulation, ground testing, and flight operations
- Use flight data, telemetry, and operational feedback to identify failures and improve system performance
Job requirements
- Experience with autonomous aircraft or aerial systems
- Background in robotics, computer vision, or motion planning
- Experience with real-time or embedded systems
- Familiarity with ROS2 or similar robotics frameworks
- Experience deploying autonomy or ML systems to resource-constrained environments