Director of Autonomy
Havoc
ABOUT US: Havoc is a leader in all-domain collaborative autonomy. Its software-defined hardware approach powers military and commercial-grade autonomous systems across sea, air, and land to sense, decide, and act together in complex and contested environments. Havoc connects assets, enabling them to share information, adapt in real time, and continue operating even when communications are disrupted or denied. Havoc optimizes mission performance and minimizes human risk. Havoc was founded in 2024 and headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island. Learn more at Havoc: All-Domain Collaborative Autonomy http://havocai.com/ . ABOUT THE ROLE As the Director of Autonomy, you will lead the technical direction, execution, and growth within HavocAI’s autonomy organization. You will be responsible for building and scaling the systems that enable autonomous vehicles to perceive, plan, coordinate, and operate in complex maritime environments. This is a senior technical leadership role for someone who has deep experience across robotics, perception, motion planning, controls, and fielded autonomous systems. You will lead teams of engineers from a technical perspective, set architecture and execution priorities, mentor senior engineers, and ensure that autonomy capabilities move quickly from concept to deployed mission capability. This role requires both breadth and depth. You should be able to reason across perception, planning, control, vehicle behavior, multi-agent coordination, simulation, testing, and deployment. You will work closely with engineering, product, field operations, hardware, mission software, and customer-facing teams to deliver robust autonomy systems that operate reliably in the real world. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AUTONOMY TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP - Own the technical direction for HavocAI’s autonomy systems across perception, planning, controls, behaviors, and vehicle-level decision-making - Define autonomy architecture, interfaces, development standards, and integration strategies across multiple engineering teams - Lead technical tradeoffs across performance, safety, reliability, latency, compute constraints, scalability, and mission needs - Ensure autonomy capabilities are designed for real-world maritime operations, not just simulation or controlled environments - Drive technical alignment between autonomy, perception, mission software, embedded systems, hardware, and field operations ROBOTICS, PLANNING & CONTROL SYSTEMS - Guide development of motion planning, path planning, behavior planning, control, and vehicle autonomy systems - Oversee autonomy capabilities for navigation, collision avoidance, target following, station keeping, formation behavior, and multi-vessel coordination - Ensure autonomy algorithms are robust to uncertain environments, degraded sensors, dynamic contacts, and complex maritime operating conditions - Partner with perception and sensor teams to ensure autonomy systems use perception outputs effectively and safely - Drive the maturation of autonomy from prototype capabilities into reliable, repeatable, fielded systems TEAM LEADERSHIP & MENTORSHIP - Lead and mentor a high-performing team of autonomy, robotics, perception, planning, and controls engineers - Provide technical guidance to engineering managers, tech leads, and senior individual contributors - Establish strong engineering practices around design reviews, architecture reviews, testing, simulation, integration, and field readiness - Help recruit, evaluate, and develop top technical talent across the autonomy organization - Create a culture of ownership, technical rigor, speed, and mission focus FIELDED AUTONOMY EXECUTION - Drive autonomy development from requirements through design, implementation, simulation, field test, deployment, and operational iteration - Ensure autonomy systems are testable, observable, debuggable, and measurable in real-world environments - Use field data, logs, test results, and operator feedback to identify gaps and im