Head of Autonomy

Join Teleo as the Head of Autonomy, where you will lead the engineering team responsible for building and scaling the autonomy stack. This senior player-coach role involves setting the technical direction, making architecture calls, and staying close to the code and field data. You will also hire, grow, and run the team, and be accountable for autonomy performance on customer deployments across several machine types.

• Lead the engineering team responsible for building and scaling Teleo's autonomy stack, including perception, simulation, controls, path planning, fleet orchestration, and learning-based methods.
• Set the technical direction, make architecture decisions, and stay closely involved with the code and field data to ensure high-quality designs and implementations.
• Manage the autonomy team directly, including hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers, and ensuring accountability for autonomy performance on customer deployments.

• Track record of hiring and developing strong engineers
• Preferred Qualifications
• Experience deploying autonomy and ML models on embedded compute (NVIDIA Jetson-class or similar)
• Took an autonomy product from prototype to multi-site commercial deployment
• Bonus Points
• Behavior cloning from human operator data and sim-to-real transfer for contact-rich tasks
• 10+ years building autonomy or robotics software, with at least 5 years managing engineering teams, including managers or technical leads
• Practical experience with learning-based methods (imitation learning, RL, or large pretrained models) and a clear view of where they beat classical approaches and where they don't
• Multi-robot coordination or fleet management systems
• Functional safety (ISO 13849, IEC 61508, ISO 25119 or similar) and safety cases for autonomous systems
• Must be a U.S. person (U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident) due to export control requirements
• Hands-on depth in at least two of: perception, planning, controls, simulation, or learning-based control, and working fluency across the full stack
• Strong C++ and Python; able to review code and designs at a senior engineer's level
• Built or run data and evaluation infrastructure that tied model changes to field performance
• Comfortable working on-site in Palo Alto and spending time in the field on job sites and test areas
• Shipped autonomy that runs on physical robots or vehicles in real operating conditions, not only in simulation
• M.S. or Ph.D. in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical or Mechanical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience
• Scaled a team through a period of fast growth
• Autonomy for off-road, construction, mining, agriculture, or defense ground vehicles
• Led autonomy work on defense programs
• Hydraulic machines or articulated manipulators, including system identification and control of hydraulic actuators
• Supervised autonomy or teleoperation systems, and designing for human intervention