VP of Engineering - Irvine, CA
1 day ago
Job description
FieldAI is transforming how robots interact with the real world. We are building risk-aware, reliable, and field-ready AI systems that address the most complex challenges in robotics, unlocking the full potential of embodied intelligence. We go beyond typical data-driven approaches or pure transformer-based architectures, and are charting a new course, with already-globally-deployed solutions delivering real-world results and rapidly improving models through real-field applications.About the Job
FieldAI is seeking a Vice President of Engineering to lead the engineering organization responsible for scaling our autonomous robotics platform from early deployments to large-scale, sustained field operations. This role works across software platforms and application engineering to ensure our robots, tools, and infrastructure are designed, tested, released, and operated with the rigor required for real-world autonomy at scale. You will partner closely with product, robotics, autonomy, and field operations leadership to align technical execution with a deployment-driven roadmap. This role blends technical depth, organizational leadership, and operational discipline, with a strong emphasis on reliability, repeatability, and system maturity.
What You'll Get To Do
-
Engineering Leadership and System Architecture
- Drive engineering efforts around a clear deployment-driven roadmap that supports reliable autonomous operation at increasing scale.
- Guide the technical direction and architecture of FieldAI's software stack, including on-robot systems, cloud services, data pipelines, and operator applications.
- Ensure clear interfaces between autonomy, platform, and application layers to support parallel execution and scale.
- Promote engineering practices that support long-lived, maintainable systems in safety-critical and operational environments.
- Partner with product and autonomy leadership to translate deployment goals into concrete technical milestones and execution plans.
- Lead teams responsible for robotics QA, release processes, and validation pipelines that support predictable and safe software releases.
- Guide development of automated testing infrastructure used for autonomy validation, regression testing, and deployment readiness.
- Oversee autonomy analytics systems that collect, process, and analyze data from real deployments to measure performance, reliability, and system limits.
- Guide software infrastructure efforts including CI/CD, dependency management, developer environments, documentation, and internal tooling.
- Support cloud infrastructure for fleet operations, monitoring, data ingestion, ML workflows, and observability.
- Collaborate with cybersecurity teams to ensure secure operation of on-robot and cloud systems.
- Lead application engineering teams building tools for robot operations, fleet management, mission planning, monitoring, and customer insight.
- Ensure tight integration between robots, cloud services, APIs, and user-facing applications.
- Support development of tools that reduce deployment effort, streamline onboarding, and automate triage and monitoring.Encourage clear separation between rapid operational support and longer-term platform evolution.
- Work with field and operations teams to ensure engineering systems support efficient, repeatable deployments.
- Improve feedback loops from live operations into engineering through metrics, tooling, and structured processes.
- Promote practices that reduce per-deployment engineering involvement over time through automation, documentation, and tooling.
- Support uptime, reliability, and autonomy performance tracking across deployed robots.
- Establish clear planning and execution rhythms that align engineering teams around shared goals and timelines.
- Improve visibility into team capacity, work in progress, and technical dependencies.
- Help teams balance near-term operational needs with longer-term system improvements.
- Support prioritization frameworks that keep engineering effort focused on the highest-impact work.
- Mentor and develop senior engineering leaders across platform and application teams.
- Partner with leadership to shape hiring plans, onboarding processes, and team composition.
- Encourage engineering practices that protect deep technical work while supporting operational needs.Foster a culture of clarity, collaboration, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Lead Software Platform Engineering
Lead Application Engineering for Robot Operations
Deployment Readiness and Execution
Planning, Prioritization, and Focus
Organization, Hiring, and Culture
What You Have
- 12+ years of experience in software engineering, with significant experience leading multi-team engineering organizations.
- Proven experience delivering and operating complex systems in production or operational environments.
- Strong technical background in distributed systems, infrastructure, reliability engineering, and software quality.
- Experience with robotics, autonomy, embedded systems, or other safety-critical or operationally intensive products.
- Demonstrated ability to work across autonomy, infrastructure, application, and operations domains.
- Strong communication skills and comfort working cross-functionally at the executive level.
The Extras That Set You Apart
- Experience scaling robotic or autonomous systems to broader operations.
- Familiarity with simulation, autonomy validation, and performance analytics.
- Experience working with operational teams, on-call rotations, or live system monitoring.
Why Join Field AI? We are solving one of the world's most complex challenges: deploying robots in unstructured, previously unknown environments. Our Field Foundational Models set a new standard in perception, planning, localization, and manipulation, ensuring our approach is explainable and safe for deployment.
You will have the opportunity to work with a world-class team that thrives on creativity, resilience, and bold thinking. With a decade-long track record of deploying solutions in the field, winning DARPA challenge segments, and bringing expertise from organizations like DeepMind, NASA JPL, Boston Dynamics, NVIDIA, Amazon, Tesla Autopilot, Cruise Self-Driving, Zoox, Toyota Research Institute, and SpaceX, we are set to achieve our ambitious goals.
Be Part of the Next Robotics Revolution To tackle such ambitious challenges, we need a team as unique as our vision — innovators who go beyond conventional methods and are eager to tackle tough, uncharted questions. We're seeking individuals who challenge the status quo, dive into uncharted territory, and bring interdisciplinary expertise. Our team requires not only top AI talent but also exceptional software developers, engineers, product designers, field deployment experts, and communicators.
We are headquartered in always-sunny Irvine in Southern California and have US based and global teammates.
Join us, shape the future, and be part of a fun, close-knit team on an exciting journey
We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Candidates and employees are always evaluated based on merit, qualifications, and performance. We will never discriminate on the basis of race, color, gender, national origin, ethnicity, veteran status, disability status, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability, or any other legally protected status. We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.
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