Director, Autonomy

Position Summary:

Brain Corp is a global leader in AI and robotic automation, creating transformative core technology for the robotics industry. Our BrainOS® platform and its cloud-connected services power one of the world's largest fleets of autonomous mobile robots operating in public spaces.

Most autonomy companies are still building toward a fleet. Ours is already at work: robots cleaning floors and scanning shelves in stores, warehouses and other public spaces around the world, every day, alongside the people who shop and work there. Each one navigates a space that changes by the hour, and every shift sends back data on how well it did. Few places give an autonomy leader all three at once: a live commercial fleet at scale, the data that comes off it, and a team that ships to it on a regular cadence.

As the Director of Autonomy, you lead a growing team of perception, SLAM and motion planning engineers working with the latest technology in autonomous navigation, from transformer-based learned models to proven classical methods. You set the technical vision, shape how the organization grows, and decide what reaches the fleet. Your team's work is measured by autonomy that runs on real robots in real stores, not papers or demos, and the results come back in fleet data you can measure. You join an engineering leadership team that runs as one team, at a company where autonomy is central to where we are going.

We are looking for an engineering leader who has architected autonomous navigation systems at autonomous vehicle or robotics companies, has taken learned models from development to a fleet operating in the real world, and wants to put that experience to work where it moves a business. You lead first: you earn trust and credibility quickly with teams across the company, bring them together, and make it happen.
Essential Job Functions:

• Technical Vision and Strategy: Define and own the long-term technical vision for autonomy at Brain and the roadmap that connects it to the business. Keep it current as technology and customer needs change, and make the calls on approach, architecture and investment that shape it.
• Organization and Team Development: Shape the structure of the autonomy organization. Lead, mentor and develop its managers and senior engineers, hire and retain top talent, grow the next generation of leaders, and build a culture of ownership, rigor and curiosity.
• Technical Leadership: Be the senior technical voice for autonomy across Brain. Hold a high bar in design and architecture reviews, and bring the state of the art into the product.
• Execution and Delivery: Deliver autonomy capabilities reliably and with quality, from research through validation and staged rollout to the fleet. Make commitments the business can plan around, and manage risk before it becomes a surprise. Report progress in terms of what works on the robot: field results, evaluation and failure analysis.
• Field Performance, Quality and Safety: Own how autonomy performs for customers in the field. Define the metrics that matter, use fleet data to set priorities, and embed safety and reliability throughout the development lifecycle.
• Business and Customer Partnership: Translate business and customer needs into technical direction, and communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to executives, customers and OEM partners, at the depth each audience needs.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Operate within a unified engineering leadership team with your peers in Applications, Quality and Applied ML, and Platform Engineering. Define autonomy's needs for compute, simulation, data and ML infrastructure, and partner with Platform Engineering to deliver them. Bring what the fleet teaches us back into future hardware, sensor and compute decisions.
• Other duties and projects as assigned.

Education and/or Work Experience Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent experience. Master's or PhD preferred.
• 10+ years of industry experience in embodied AI (autonomous vehicles, robotics, drones or similar), with at least 6 years leading engineering teams, including leading other managers.
• Proven track record at an established autonomy company of taking learned navigation, planning or perception models from research to a fleet operating in the real world.

Required Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, and Other Characteristics:

• Proven delivery: predictable, high-quality releases from multiple teams working against a live production system.
• Proven ability to grow managers and senior engineers, set a clear bar, and hold it with care.
• Experience setting a multi-year technical roadmap and aligning engineering organizations behind it, balancing near-term delivery with long-term scale.
• Excellent communication and the EQ to work across executives, partners and engineers at the right technical depth; able to give a clear answer, defend it, and update it when the evidence changes.
• Experience across SLAM and state estimation, motion planning, and robotic perception, with depth in at least one.
• Familiarity with modern learning approaches for robotics (transformers, vision-language-action models, imitation learning, diffusion policies) and sound judgment about when a learned approach beats a classical one.
• Experience with the full ML lifecycle in production, from fleet data to evaluation, deployment and monitoring, and the judgment to tell whether a field failure lives in the model, the rest of the stack or the data.

Things that make a difference:

• Experience with commercial mobile robots in public or commercial spaces (retail, warehouse, cleaning, logistics).
• On-device model deployment and acceleration on embedded GPU and accelerator hardware (TensorRT, ONNX, CUDA).
• Research impact (CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS, CVPR, ICML or open-source equivalents) converted into product.
• Experience co-developing with OEM partners' hardware and engineering teams.
• Experience leading distributed engineering teams alongside a co-located core team.
• Experience leading through a company's growth and change.
• Experience applying modern AI tools and models to software development and delivery.

Physical Demands:

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. Essential functions may require maintaining the physical condition necessary for sitting, walking or standing for periods of time; operating a computer and keyboard; talk and hear at normal room levels; using hands to finger, grasp, and feel; repetitive motion; close visual acuity to prepare and analyze data and figures; transcribing; viewing a computer terminal; extensive reading; walking customer and lab floors alongside operating robots; lift, push, carry, or pull up to 20 pounds.
Work Environment:

The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. The noise level in the work environment is usually quiet to moderate. Employees are exposed to the typical office environment with computers, printers and telephones, and to the robot lab and customer sites with operating robots and equipment.
Salary Range:

The anticipated salary range for candidates who will work in San Diego, California is $254,000 to $354,000. The final salary offered to a successful candidate will be dependent on several factors that may include but are not limited to the type and length of experience within the job, type and length of experience within the industry, education, etc. Brain Corp is a multi-state employer and this salary range may not reflect positions that work in other states.

In addition to base pay, our competitive total rewards package consists of:

• A discretionary annual target bonus
• Stock options
• 401(k) plan with match (no waiting period and immediate vesting)
• Comprehensive suite of insurance benefits for employees (and their families) to include a variety of medical plan options (including an HSA with employer contribution), dental, vision, life and disability insurance, Employee Assistance Program (EAP), Legal/Identity support plans, pet insurance.
• Access to Flexible Spending Accounts (Medical and Dependent Care)
• Generous paid time off including flexible vacation, Paid Sick Leave, time off for volunteering in the community, 10 paid company holidays, and a winter company shutdown

Additional Perks include:

• Daily on-site lunch available in the San Diego office
• On-campus gym including pool and tennis courts in the San Diego office
• Opportunities to connect with colleagues including monthly game nights, hikes, wellness challenges, and community events
• Internal continuous learning events
• Opportunities to share your own interests and hobbies with the Company