Autonomous Warfare Technical Director

Sacbar; Mountain View (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Sacbar seeks an experienced Autonomous Warfare Technical Director to lead strategy, technical execution, and integration of next-generation autonomous warfare capabilities for defense programs in Mountain View, CA. You will shape portfolios, evaluate technologies, and set engineering standards across hardware, software, and enabling tech.

The role requires deep autonomy/robotics expertise, proven production-grade delivery, and the ability to drive risk management, testing, and transition to

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a technical field with 10+ years of relevant experience or Master’s with 7+ years, or high school diploma with 15+ years.
• Deep expertise in autonomy, robotics, AI, or related fields.
• Experience fielding production-grade autonomous or robotic systems outside controlled environments.
• Ability to communicate effectively with engineers, operators, executives, and government leaders.
• U.S. Citizenship is required and TS/SCI security clearance or ability to obtain.
• Willingness to travel ~30% and Mountain View, CA location.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical execution and shepherd portfolio programs, owning milestones and risk mitigation.
• Advise programs from problem definition through testing, transition, and fielding.
• Evaluate commercial or government systems for maturity, reliability, and scalability.
• Assess autonomy hardware/software stacks and human-machine interfaces.
• Develop technical requirements, reference architectures, and transition standards.
• Ensure credible testing evidence on performance, safety, and mission effectiveness.
• Lead system architecture for autonomous platforms and decision-support systems.

Job description

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.