Director, Autonomy

Brain Corp, San Diego, CA

The role

Brain Corp is a global leader in AI and robotic automation, creating transformative core technology for the robotics industry. Our BrainOS® platform and its cloud-connected services power one of the world's largest fleets of autonomous mobile robots operating in public spaces.

Most autonomy companies are still building toward a fleet. Ours is already at work: robots cleaning floors and scanning shelves in stores, warehouses and other public spaces around the world, every day, alongside the people who shop and work there. Each one navigates a space that changes by the hour, and every shift sends back data on how well it did. Few places give an autonomy leader all three at once: a live commercial fleet at scale, the data that comes off it, and a team that ships to it on a regular cadence.

Posted pay

$254K–$354K

a year

Compared with similar jobs

This base pay is near the median for director-level ML and AI engineering jobs in the US.

Median: $291K a year
Other jobs in the group: 54

We compare the middle of each posted range. This is base pay as posted. The group does not include this job.

Location

San Diego, CA

Work type

Not given

Level

Director+, manager

Experience

10+ years

Posted

Today

Last check

8 h ago

Job type

ML / AI engineering, Inference & ML systems

The role

What you need

Education and/or Work Experience Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent experience. Master's or PhD preferred.
10+ years of industry experience in embodied AI (autonomous vehicles, robotics, drones or similar), with at least 6 years leading engineering teams, including leading other managers.
Proven track record at an established autonomy company of taking learned navigation, planning or perception models from research to a fleet operating in the real world.

Required Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, and Other Characteristics

Proven delivery: predictable, high-quality releases from multiple teams working against a live production system.
Proven ability to grow managers and senior engineers, set a clear bar, and hold it with care.
Experience setting a multi-year technical roadmap and aligning engineering organizations behind it, balancing near-term delivery with long-term scale.
Excellent communication and the EQ to work across executives, partners and engineers at the right technical depth; able to give a clear answer, defend it, and update it when the evidence changes.
Experience across SLAM and state estimation, motion planning, and robotic perception, with depth in at least one.
Familiarity with modern learning approaches for robotics (transformers, vision-language-action models, imitation learning, diffusion policies) and sound judgment about when a learned approach beats a classical one.
Experience with the full ML lifecycle in production, from fleet data to evaluation, deployment and monitoring, and the judgment to tell whether a field failure lives in the model, the rest of the stack or the data.

Things that make a difference

Experience with commercial mobile robots in public or commercial spaces (retail, warehouse, cleaning, logistics).
On-device model deployment and acceleration on embedded GPU and accelerator hardware (TensorRT, ONNX, CUDA).
Research impact (CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS, CVPR, ICML or open-source equivalents) converted into product.
Experience co-developing with OEM partners' hardware and engineering teams.
Experience leading distributed engineering teams alongside a co-located core team.
Experience leading through a company's growth and change.
Experience applying modern AI tools and models to software development and delivery.

Physical Demands

Work Environment

The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. The noise level in the work environment is usually quiet to moderate. Employees are exposed to the typical office environment with computers, printers and telephones, and to the robot lab and customer sites with operating robots and equipment.

Director, Autonomy

The role

Director, Autonomy

The role

What you need

Education and/or Work Experience Requirements

Required Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, and Other Characteristics

Things that make a difference

Physical Demands

Work Environment

Essential Job Functions

Pay and benefits

In addition to base pay, our competitive total rewards package consists of

Additional Perks include

About Brain Corp

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Interview questions

Brain Corp

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