Director, Vehicle Integration AV Platform Engineering - Atoms

OpenTalent; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Atoms is hiring a Director of Vehicle Integration to lead the group that makes it possible to develop and test our vehicle platforms. The role is hands-on and serves as a player-coach, supervising senior engineers and technicians who perform hardware-in-the-loop validation and bench testing to move from kit to fleet.

You will own the integration architecture for the development fleet, including electrical architecture, mounting, sensor and compute placement, power, and drive-by-wire interfaces,

Responsibilities

• Off-vehicle validation. Own the hardware-in-the-loop and bench capability that validates a software release against real vehicle interfaces. Build it modular for reuse across configurations.
• Integration architecture. Own the autonomy integration on the development fleet: electrical architecture, harnesses, mounting, sensor and compute placement, power, and drive-by-wire interfaces.

Job description

Atoms is building the machines that power the next era of progress.

Over the last decade, software has transformed the digital world. But the physical world, where food is made, minerals are mined, goods are moved, and industries are run, remains far less intelligent, far less efficient, and far more constrained. We're changing that.

Atoms builds Physical AI- real-world robots for the industries that move civilization forward, starting with food, mining, and transport. Our systems are designed to understand, predict, and control the real world with precision, turning complex physical operations into something more reliable, more scalable, and more productive.

This work requires more than robotics. It requires deep integration across hardware, software, AI, operations, manufacturing, and real estate. We don't just build machines in a lab. We deploy them into real environments, operate them, learn from them, and improve them until they work at scale.

We are roboticists, engineers, operators, and builders. We believe the next great technology companies will not only transform information, but the physical systems that shape everyday life.

If you want to work on hard problems with real-world impact, join us.

About the role

We are hiring a Director of Vehicle Integration to lead the group that makes it possible to develop and test our vehicle platforms. The group owns the hardware-in-the-loop and bench capability our autonomy software is validated against, the bring-up and commissioning that take a vehicle from kit to fleet. When a problem cannot be resolved in the field, this group is the engineering backstop.

One platform will serve more than one vehicle program, and we expect the hardware to be re-spun as we learn from deployment. What we intend to control is that any re-spin is cheap, fast, and testable off the vehicle, which makes modularity the governing design constraint on what this group builds in the lap. This is a player-coach role: hands-on leading senior engineers and technicians who are doing this work alongside the open positions you will create and fill.

What you'll do

• Off-vehicle validation. Own the hardware-in-the-loop and bench capability that validates a software release against real vehicle interfaces, including where bench behavior and vehicle behavior diverge. Build it modular, so later configurations reuse the harness breakouts, power, sensor interfaces, and logging paths.
• Integration architecture. Own the autonomy integration on the development fleet: electrical architecture, harnesses, mounting, sensor and compute placement, power, and the drive-by-wire and actuation interface to the base vehicle, including fault handling and degraded-mode behavior.