Head of AUV Autonomy & Vehicle Software

Bedrock; Richmond, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 235,000; Full time

Job summary

Bedrock Ocean Exploration is seeking a Staff Robotics Engineer to set the technical direction for autonomy and vehicle software across our autonomous underwater vehicles. You will own architecture, drive modular design, and coordinate across GNC, sensing, and field operations to ensure reliable, scalable campaigns.

You will mentor engineers, lead end-to-end robotics challenges, and champion AI-enabled workflows while maintaining safety and reliability aboard demanding ocean missions.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building robotics or autonomous-systems software in production environments.
• Robust, modular vehicle software architecture experience.
• Strong C++ and Python fundamentals; ROS/ROS2 on real hardware.
• Experience with fault detection and recovery (FDIR) and safety-critical systems.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of the vehicle software system with modular interfaces across onboard software, GNC, sensing, and autonomy.
• Lead cross-disciplinary robotics problems end-to-end.
• Set and raise standards for building, testing, and validating software; use quality metrics to find gaps.
• Drive rigorous testing across simulation, hardware-in-the-loop, and field trials; diagnose issues.
• Improve autonomy and vehicle behaviors for long, continuous missions.
• Own fault management and vehicle health end-to-end: FDIR, safe-state, and recovery.
• Share in on-call rotation and build runbooks, telemetry, and escalation paths.
• Design for fleet scale: over-the-air deployment with versioning and rollback.
• Ensure vehicles come home with reliable data: logging and time-synchronization.

Skills

C++

Python

ROS/ROS2

GNC

State estimation

Autonomy software

Leadership

Communication

Tools

ROS/ROS2

Job description

Bedrock Ocean Exploration is seeking a Staff Robotics Engineer to set the technical direction for autonomy and vehicle software across our autonomous underwater vehicles. You will own architecture, drive modular design, and coordinate across GNC, sensing, and field operations to ensure reliable, scalable campaigns.

You will mentor engineers, lead end-to-end robotics challenges, and champion AI-enabled workflows while maintaining safety and reliability aboard demanding ocean missions.