Manager of Engineering - Autonomous Pilot Integration - Expeditionary (R5175)

Lead the Team — Manage a small-to-mid-sized engineering team (typically 5–10 engineers); own performance, growth, leveling, and delivery; run 1:1s, performance reviews, and team rituals.

Grow the Team via Hiring — Drive hiring for your area: identify the skills you need, partner with recruiting, run interviews, set the bar, and personally close strong candidates.

Grow Engineers Technically — Mentor engineers through hard problems; create stretch opportunities; give direct, actionable technical feedback; help engineers level up in both skill and impact.

Aircraft Team Partnership — Maintain an exceptionally close, daily working relationship with the aircraft team that builds and maintains V-BAT — coordinating continuously on platform changes, autopilot interface evolution, sensor integration, hardware/software compatibility, and release planning. For X-BAT, work closely with the aircraft team to define and integrate the flight-autonomy interface. The success of this role depends heavily on these partnerships.

Develop & Field Autonomy — Develop & integrate autonomy software solutions onto V-BAT, including payload and sensor integration (e.g., payload computer bring-up, ViDAR, EO/IR), integration with the custom V-BAT autopilot and its control modes (e.g., HSA, waypoint), multi-agent coordination, and customer release cadence — and lead a small team through the design, development, and delivery of a major capability or program.

Technical Leadership — Lead a small feature crew or sub-program; set technical direction, break down work, unblock the team, and report progress to leadership and stakeholders.

Hands-on Technical Contribution — Stay active in the code; contribute directly where it serves the team — prototyping new capabilities, taking on deep technical analysis of hard problems, or absorbing critical work during demo crunch. This is a manager role, not a managing-only role.

Collaboration Across Teams & Partners — Act as a primary technical interface with the Autonomy Capabilities team (motion planning, tactics), the Perception team, the GCS team, feature crews, the Strategic Systems (ACP) portfolio (whose existing mission autonomy solution underpins X-BAT), and customer/program offices (U.S. and international services); author and negotiate ICDs and interface contracts rather than just consume them.

Design & Documentation — Drive design reviews, ICDs, and post-mortems for your area; push the team toward higher rigor and close process gaps that span teams.

Pre-deployment Preparation — Own the build, configuration, and validation process for mission-ready systems and customer releases; coordinate hardware/software compatibility, mission readiness, release cadence, and operator-facing workflow validation with capability and feature teams.

On-site Test & Mission Support — Travel to test sites, customer exercises, and operator training/deployment events to support live mission operations (flight tests, range exercises, multi-agent live events, customer demonstrations, and fielded operator support), including safety checks, system bring-up, and troubleshooting under time-critical constraints.

Hardware/Software Debugging — Diagnose and resolve integration issues across complex autonomy stacks, payload computers, and embedded systems in lab and field environments — including memory, CPU, and timing profiling under operationally-representative loads.

Mission Data & Debrief Support — Capture mission and test data, reproduce issues in simulation, and partner with autonomy capability owners to drive fixes back into the next build.

Continuous Improvement — Build tools and processes to improve integration timelines, test/mission reliability, and team efficiency across deployment cycles.

C2 Interoperability & Standards — Own the interface contracts with GCS and C2 providers and drive compliance against common message and open-systems standards (e.g., STANAG 4586, UCI, OMS).

Travel Requirement – Members of this team typically travel around 20-30% of the year (to different office locations, customer sites, operator training and deployment events, and integration events).