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Systems Engineer, Autonomous Vehicles

Charlottesville, Virginia

Remote-friendly, U.S.-based | Full time | Periodic travel to customer sites


About the Role

You will be the systems engineer on our federal autonomous vehicle programs, working directly with our founder and CEO — who architected the TONY and MAX platforms — on the technical definition, safety, and approval of live deployments. You will own the requirements, the operational design domain, the safety case, and the cybersecurity and data posture for systems that carry people and cargo on real roads, and you will defend that work in front of customers and government approval authorities.

This is not a maintenance role. In your first ninety days you will help scope a deployment on a live U.S. Army installation, define its operating envelope, produce the safety package that gets us approval to operate, and support route mapping in the field.

What You'll Do

  • Requirements and system definition

    • Draft, structure and maintain system and subsystem requirements, with traceability from customer need through verification

    • Author interface definitions between vehicle, autonomy stack, fleet management software and customer systems

    • Keep requirements current as deployments evolve — this is ongoing ownership, not a one-time document drop

    • Produce system design documentation, architecture diagrams, and sensor and hardware layout drawings

  • Operational design domain and safety

    • Define and document the ODD for each deployment: roadway types, speeds, lighting, weather, traffic, and known limitations

    • Author safety cases, hazard and risk analyses, intervention and emergency procedures, and minimum-risk condition behaviors

    • Support the path toward driver-out operation — redundancy analysis, fallback logic, degraded-mode handling for communications and GNSS loss, and the validation evidence behind it

    • Prepare and defend safety documentation for customer and government approval authorities

  • Cybersecurity and data

    • Own the data management, sharing and cybersecurity plan for each deployment

    • Apply recognized frameworks — NIST, DoD Risk Management Framework, automotive ISAC practice — to onboard and cloud architecture

    • Define what data is collected, how it is protected, retained and released

  • Field and customer work

    • Participate in site surveys: assess routes, infrastructure, operational constraints and stakeholder requirements

    • Support route mapping and validation on site, alongside our operators and technicians

    • Brief customers, installation leadership and government evaluators — clearly, honestly and without hand-waving

Required Skills & Experience

  • 5+ years in systems engineering, ideally in autonomous vehicles, robotics, automotive, aerospace or defense

  • Genuinely strong writing. A large fraction of this job is producing clear, precise, defensible technical documents on deadline. If you dislike writing, you will not enjoy this role

  • Methodical and organized. You track your own commitments, you notice what has not been closed out, and you do not need to be chased

  • Energetic and self-directed. We are small. Nobody will assign you work in fifteen-minute increments

  • Working knowledge of SAE J3016 autonomy levels and functional safety practice such as ISO 26262 or equivalent

  • Comfort with sensor systems — lidar, radar, camera, GNSS, IMU — and how they behave and fail in the real world

  • Ability to read and reason about code, even if you are not writing production software day to day

  • U.S. citizenship, required for the federal installation access this role depends on

  • Willingness to travel, typically one to two week deployments at customer sites several times a year

Preferred Qualifications

  • Prior work on a fielded autonomous system, not only a research program

  • Experience with a government or military customer, or with an installation approval process

  • HD mapping, localization or route definition experience

  • Requirements management tooling, or a strong opinion about how to do it well without heavyweight tools

  • Mechanical drafting or CAD for sensor mounting and vehicle layout

How We Work

We use AI tools aggressively, and we expect you to. We treat Claude and similar tools as force multipliers for requirements drafting, safety analysis, document production, code review and research. A small team competing against companies a hundred times our size does it by working smarter, and we are explicit about that. Candidates who are fluent with these tools — and thoughtful about where they help and where they must not be trusted — will do well here.

Remote is fine. Most of this work can be done from anywhere in the U.S. We care about output and reliability, not chair time. But this is a physical product on real vehicles, so you will travel, and when you are on site you are fully present.

You will be mentored, deliberately. You will work directly alongside our founder on system architecture and the deeper behavior of our autonomy stack. If you want to become genuinely expert in fielded autonomous systems rather than a narrow slice of one, this is an unusual opportunity.

Why this role is worth your time

Most autonomy engineers work on a fragment of a system inside a large organization, on a program that may never leave the lab. Here you will own the technical definition of deployments that carry real people on real roads, defend them in front of government approval authorities, and see them operate. Your work will directly determine whether a 22-year-old American company wins against competitors with billions in venture funding.

It is demanding, the timelines are real, and the stakes are visible. That is the job.


To Apply

Submit your résumé and a brief introduction to jobs@perronerobotics.com.