Who We Are

AeroVect is transforming ground handling with autonomy, redefining how airlines and ground service providers around the globe run day-to-day operations. We are a private company founded in 2020 and backed by top-tier venture capital investors in aviation and autonomous driving. Our customers include some of the world’s largest airlines and ground handling providers. For more information, visit www.aerovect.com.

Job Description

We are looking for an extraordinary Engineering leader who is passionate about the products they build and the people they lead. Our Vice President of Engineering should be someone who knows how to bring leading-edge system design to autonomous driving systems. In this role, you’ll lead, manage and scale our autonomous software and engineering teams and lead a fast-paced, early-stage startup. Leveraging your experience building production-grade systems, you’ll propel the AeroVect Driver to the next level, achieving category-defining vehicle autonomy for the airport operational design domain.

Your scope will include scaling the engineering organization, leading product roadmap, and system design/architecture — working closely with our co-founders, along with hands-on engineering. You’ll lead by example, making key improvements to critical modules that include planning, prediction, perception, localization, and controls, incorporating both leading-edge techniques as well as proven, off-the-shelf approaches to support all autonomous driving and towing functions, creating unprecedented value and functionality for the modern supply chain. 

The opportunity offers a technical, hands-on team leader the chance to help develop a market-defining enterprise product that combines autonomous vehicle technology with a robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) business model. This role reports directly to our co-founders.

What You’ll Do

• Define the vision, strategy, and roadmap of the AeroVect Autonomous Driver and Engineering organization.

• Define, lead, and own the development of an autonomous driving stack for structured logistics environments, targeting milestones, growing the team, and working with internal/external partners — your time will be spent performing hands-on development, defining requirements, directing schedule, removing obstacles, designing/coaching the team to hit ambitious milestones, and building a team of world-class engineers.

• Lead a team of engineers bringing up all components necessary for reliable autonomous driving in the airside environment, including vehicle corridors and the apron.

• Design, implement, test, and support all aspects of ground vehicle autonomy, including planning, prediction, perception, localization, controls, and infrastructure subsystems

• Qualify all subsystems using objective measures, with an eye to functional safety and systems engineering best practices.

• Collaborate with vehicle engineering to create an integrated system, including sensor/compute selection and integration.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Strong CS fundamentals (via industry or research experience)

• Background in developing the autonomy (perception, localization, and planning) functions of a deployed, autonomous vehicle

• 10+ years of complex engineering experience

• 2+ years experience leading robotics software engineering teams

• Industrial automation experience shipping safety-critical software

• Experience shipping a working robotics or vehicle autonomy system

• Candidates with unconventional experiences especially encouraged

• Willingness to get hands-on and have lots of fun

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD / advanced research or industry experience in vehicle autonomy or robotics

• Background in safety-critical software/system development (preferably a ground robotics functional safety standards such as ISO 26262 or IEC 61508)

• Prior experience developing and supporting all aspects of autonomy for a production ground-vehicle system, or research prototype (end-to-end, full lifecycle development preferred)

• Startup experience in an engineering leadership role

• Experience with ROS