Autonomous Warfare Technical Director

Evolving Solution Services; Mountain View (CA); Hybrid; USD 205,000 - 225,000; Full time

Job summary

Evolving Solution Services in Mountain View, CA is seeking an Autonomous Warfare Technical Director to lead strategic development and integration of next-generation autonomous warfare capabilities for the DIU program. You will shape portfolio strategy, establish engineering standards, and mitigate risks across hardware and software ecosystems.

The role demands deep expertise in autonomy, robotics, and production-grade systems, with a track record of delivering complex programs. U.S.

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in autonomy, robotics, AI, or related fields.
• Commercial or government experience developing autonomous or robotic products.
• Experience fielding production-grade systems outside controlled environments.
• Technical judgment across perception, planning, control, and data.
• Ability to define requirements, design tests, and analyze performance.
• Production engineering practices including CI/CD, cybersecurity, and sustainment.
• Ability to communicate with engineers, operators, and executives.
• U.S. Citizenship is required.
• Possession or ability to obtain TS/SCI clearance.
• Ability to travel roughly 30% of the time.
• Location: Mountain View, CA

Responsibilities

• Drives technical execution and ownership of engineering milestones and integration.
• Advise programs from problem definition through testing and fielding.
• Evaluate commercial systems for maturity, reliability, and relevance.
• Assess autonomy hardware/software stacks including sensing, planning, and control.
• Develop technical requirements, reference architectures, and test approaches.
• Ensure tests produce credible evidence on performance, safety, and interoperability.
• Provide SME across land, sea, air, cyber, and space robotics programs.

Skills

Autonomy & robotics

Production-grade systems

System integration

Technical judgment

Requirements & testing

Cybersecurity & sustainment

Communication to engineers & leaders

U.S. citizenship

TS/SCI eligibility

Travel 30%

Education

Bachelor’s degree + 10 years

Master’s degree + 7 years

High School diploma + 15 years

Job description

If you are unable to complete this application due to a disability, contact this employer to ask for an accommodation or an alternative application process.

Autonomous Warfare Technical Director

FullTime Management Mountain View, CA, US

6 days ago Requisition ID: 1136

Salary Range: $205,000.00 To $225,000.00 Annually

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.