Manager of Engineering - Autonomous Pilot Integration (R5153)

Lead the Team — Manage a small-to-mid-sized engineering team (typically 3–8 engineers); own performance, growth, leveling, and delivery; run 1:1s, performance reviews, and team rituals.

Grow the Team via Hiring — Drive hiring for your area: identify the skills you need, partner with recruiting, run interviews, set the bar, and personally close strong candidates.

Grow Engineers Technically — Mentor engineers through hard problems; create stretch opportunities; give direct, actionable technical feedback; help engineers level up in both skill and impact.

Develop & Field Autonomy — Develop & integrate autonomy software solutions onto launched effects platforms, including payload computer bring-up, autopilot integration (e.g., PX4, ArduPilot), multi-agent coordination, and fleet-scale deployment to disconnected or air-gapped environments — and lead a small team through the design, development, and delivery of a major capability or program.

Technical Leadership — Lead a small feature crew or sub-program; set technical direction, break down work, unblock the team, and report progress to leadership and stakeholders.

Collaboration Across Teams & Partners — Act as a primary technical interface with the Autonomy Capabilities team (motion planning, tactics), the Perception team, feature crews, autopilot vendors (e.g., PX4, ArduPilot), C2 providers, and customer/contractor partners (including embedded contractor engineers and U.S. or international government program offices); author and negotiate ICDs and interface contracts rather than just consume them.

Design & Documentation — Drive design reviews, ICDs, and post-mortems for your area; push the team toward higher rigor and close process gaps that span teams.

Pre-deployment Preparation — Own the build, configuration, and validation process for mission-ready systems and fleet-scale deployments (often 50–150+ units in disconnected environments); coordinate hardware/software compatibility, mission readiness, and Capability Release (CR) cadence with capability and feature teams.

On-site Test & Mission Support — Travel to test sites and customer exercises to support live mission operations (flight tests, range exercises, multi-agent live events, customer demonstrations), including safety checks, system bring-up, and troubleshooting under time-critical constraints.

Hardware/Software Debugging — Diagnose and resolve integration issues across complex autonomy stacks, payload computers, and embedded systems in lab and field environments — including memory, CPU, and timing profiling under operationally-representative loads.

Mission Data & Debrief Support — Capture mission and test data, reproduce issues in simulation, and partner with autonomy capability owners to drive fixes back into the next build.

Continuous Improvement — Build tools and processes to improve integration timelines, test/mission reliability, and team efficiency across deployment cycles.

C2 Interoperability & Standards — Own the interface contracts with C2 providers and drive compliance against common message and open-systems standards (e.g., UCI, OMS, MOSA, WOSA, TAK/CoT).

Travel Requirement – Members of this team typically travel around 20-30% of the year (to different office locations, customer sites, range exercises, and integration events).