Senior Engineering Manager, Robotics Software

Hadrian; Santa Monica (CA); On-site; USD 249,000 - 299,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision, and life保险

401k

Relocation support

Flexible vacation policy

Equity

Job summary

Hadrian is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the Autonomous Factory Systems team in California. You will hire and grow engineers responsible for perception, planning, behaviors, and control, and align hardware, controls, product, and operations to deliver a prioritized robotics roadmap.

You will influence technical direction while maintaining hands-on involvement with staffing, architecture decisions, and development practices in a fast-paced, high-stakes manufacturing environment.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of engineering management experience leading robotics, autonomy, or other complex technical teams in production.
• A genuine passion for people management — you care about your engineers' growth and happiness as much as you care about what the team ships.
• A track record of hiring and building strong technical teams, including for hard-to-fill or specialized roles.
• Technical fluency in robotics concepts (perception, planning, behaviors, control, collision avoidance) to have informed conversations about tradeoffs, evaluate technical leads' proposals, and contribute a useful point of view on direction and prioritization — without needing to be the architect yourself.
• Strong judgment on organizational design: how to structure a team, allocate headcount across projects, and balance depth vs. breadth as the stack grows.
• Excellent communication and cross-functional partnership skills — you can align engineers, technical leads, hardware/controls partners, and leadership.
• A track record of running a healthy team: clear expectations, direct feedback, and a strong sense of ownership among your engineers.
• Comfortable working in a fast-moving environment with high stakes, physical systems, and short iteration cycles.
• M.S. in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related field.

Responsibilities

• Own the people leadership of your engineers: hiring, onboarding, mentorship, career growth, and performance.
• Build a hiring engine for robotics talent — define the bar, run a strong interview process, and help recruit a top-tier team across perception, planning, behaviors, and control.
• Ensure engineers are engaged, growing, and set up to do their best work; regularly assess team health and address issues before they become problems.
• Have real input into technical direction and where we invest headcount, in close partnership with the engineers and technical leads who drive architecture and design.
• Partner with Hardware, Controls, Product, and Operations to translate business priorities into a sequenced roadmap, and make sure the team is resourced and organized to deliver it.
• Continuously improve the team's engineering practices and developer lifecycle: planning, design review, code review, testing, simulation, deployment, on-call, and incident response.

Skills

Engineering management

People management

Hiring

Robotics concepts

Organizational design

Communication

Ownership

Education

M.S. in Computer Science or Robotics

Job description

Hadrian - Manufacturing the Future

Hadrian is building autonomous factories to reindustrialize America. By combining AI, advanced software, robotics, and full-stack manufacturing, we help aerospace and defense companies build rockets, satellites, aircraft, ships, and other mission-critical systems up to 10x faster and at significantly lower cost.

Following our $1.37B Series D at a $7.87B valuation, Hadrian is rapidly expanding our manufacturing footprint, launching new capabilities across welding, casting, forging, electronics, additive manufacturing, and more, while scaling our Factory-as-a-Service platform to transform how critical products are built.

Backed by leading investors including JPMorgan Chase, Valor Equity Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, 137 Ventures, Lux Capital, T. Rowe Price, and Morgan Stanley, we’re building the future of American manufacturing—and looking for exceptional people to help make it happen.

If you’re ready to take on the most challenging and rewarding work of your career while helping create American manufacturing jobs for generations to come, you’re exactly who we’re looking for.

The Role

The Autonomous Factory Systems team builds the software that gives Hadrian's factories the ability to sense, decide, and act autonomously. This includes the core robotics stack — perception, behaviors, planning, collision avoidance, and high-level control — alongside orchestration between robots and manufacturing machines and the hardware abstraction layer that connects our software to the machines on the floor.

You will build and manage a team of engineers focused on the robotics side of this stack. This is a people-first management role: your focus is on hiring, growing, and supporting a strong team, while staying close enough to the technical work to help guide direction and staffing decisions.

What You’ll Do

• Own the people leadership of your engineers: hiring, onboarding, mentorship, career growth, and performance.

• Build a hiring engine for robotics talent — define the bar, run a strong interview process, and help recruit a top-tier team across perception, planning, behaviors, and control.

• Ensure engineers are engaged, growing, and set up to do their best work; regularly assess team health and address issues before they become problems.

• Have real input into technical direction and where we invest headcount, in close partnership with the engineers and technical leads who drive architecture and design.

• Partner with Hardware, Controls, Product, and Operations to translate business priorities into a sequenced roadmap, and make sure the team is resourced and organized to deliver it.

• Continuously improve the team's engineering practices and developer lifecycle: planning, design review, code review, testing, simulation, deployment, on-call, and incident response.

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of engineering management experience leading robotics, autonomy, or other complex technical teams in production.

• A genuine passion for people management — you care about your engineers' growth and happiness as much as you care about what the team ships.

• A track record of hiring and building strong technical teams, including for hard-to-fill or specialized roles.

• Technical fluency in robotics concepts (perception, planning, behaviors, control, collision avoidance) to have informed conversations about tradeoffs, evaluate technical leads' proposals, and contribute a useful point of view on direction and prioritization — without needing to be the architect yourself.

• Strong judgment on organizational design: how to structure a team, allocate headcount across projects, and balance depth vs. breadth as the stack grows.

• Excellent communication and cross-functional partnership skills — you can align engineers, technical leads, hardware/controls partners, and leadership.

• A track record of running a healthy team: clear expectations, direct feedback, and a strong sense of ownership among your engineers.

• Comfortable working in a fast-moving environment with high stakes, physical systems, and short iteration cycles.

• M.S. in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related field.

What Will Set You Apart

• A track record of scaling a team through a period of fast headcount growth, including building out interview loops and onboarding from scratch.

• Experience mentoring engineers to grow into broader technical leadership roles.

• Experience managing engineers across multiple robotics disciplines (e.g., perception and planning)

Compensation

For this role, the target salary range is $249,000 - $299,000 (actual range may vary based on experience).

This is the lowest to highest salary we reasonably and in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the range may be modified in the future. An employee's pay position within the salary range will be based on several factors, including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs.

Benefits for Full-time Employees

• Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance plans for employees

• 401k

• Relocation support may be provided for certain situations, based on business need.

• Flexible vacation policy

• Equity

ITAR Requirements

To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.

Use of AI in hiring

Hadrian uses AI-assisted tools in our recruiting and hiring processes to help our team work more efficiently. This may include tools that help organize and analyze recruiting data, as well as an AI-powered notetaker that can record and transcribe interviews and help coordinate feedback. These tools support our team and are not used to make hiring decisions. All candidate evaluations and hiring decisions are performed by humans. If an interview will be recorded, you will be notified in advance and may opt out at any time with no impact on your candidacy. Candidate data processed through these tools is subject to the same protections described in our Privacy Policy.

Hadrian Is An Equal Opportunity Employer

It is the Company’s policy to provide equal employment opportunity for all applicants and employees. The Company does not unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race inclusive of traits historically associated with race (including, but not limited to, hair texture and protective hairstyles, such as braids, locks and twists), color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, national origin (including, in California, possession of a drivers license), ancestry, citizenship, age, physical or mental disability, height or weight, medical condition, family care status, military or veteran status, marital status, domestic partner status, sexual orientation, genetic information, exercise of reproductive rights, any other basis protected by local, state, or federal laws, or any combination of the above characteristics. When necessary, the Company also makes reasonable accommodations for disabled candidates and employees, including for candidates or employees who are disabled by pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.