Senior Director, Mining Autonomous Platform (AV Platform Engineering)
Senior engineering leadership role at a Physical AI robotics company: build and own the autonomy retrofit platform for autonomous mining trucks — electrical/harness integration, commissioning, bench/HIL validation, reliability diagnostics, and team building. Requires deep hands-on vehicle-networks/drive-by-wire experience and 10-12+ years; onsite in San Francisco with regular mine-site travel.
- Compensation
- $255K–$322K / yr
- Location
- San Francisco, CA
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- 12+ years
- Category
- Devops
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Bachelor's in EE, ME, Computer Engineering, CS, Robotics, or related with 12+ years experience, or Master's with 10+
- Experience leading engineers on an autonomous or similar program, including hiring, technical direction, and delivering against dates
- Ownership of a vehicle or machine integration platform from architecture through field deployment
- Hands-on experience with machine and vehicle networks (CAN, CAN FD, automotive Ethernet)
- Drive-by-wire and actuation integration experience
- Electrical and harness architecture experience for harsh environments
- Embedded compute and sensor integration experience
- Hardware-in-the-loop and bench validation experience
- Experience converting bespoke per-customer/per-platform engineering into a configurable product with documented interfaces
- Working understanding of autonomous systems end to end (sensing, perception, localization, planning, controls, safety architecture)
- Track record establishing reliability, availability, or failure-rate measurement that changed organizational priorities
- Experience acting as senior technical presence at a customer or partner site during a launch or failure
- Strong written practice covering architecture documents, integration specifications, and failure analyses
- Willingness to travel regularly to active mine and quarry sites, domestic and international (PPE, lifting up to 50 lbs, work at rack level and in operating pits)
- Ability to work onsite five days a week in San Francisco
Full description
Who we are
Atoms is building the machines that power the next era of progress.
Over the last decade, software has transformed the digital world. But the physical world, where food is made, minerals are mined, goods are moved, and industries are run, remains far less intelligent, far less efficient, and far more constrained. We’re changing that.
Atoms builds Physical AI— real-world robots for the industries that move civilization forward, starting with food, mining, and transport. Our systems are designed to understand, predict, and control the real world with precision, turning complex physical operations into something more reliable, more scalable, and more productive.
This work requires more than robotics. It requires deep integration across hardware, software, AI, operations, manufacturing, and real estate. We don’t just build machines in a lab. We deploy them into real environments, operate them, learn from them, and improve them until they work at scale.
We are roboticists, engineers, operators, and builders. We believe the next great technology companies will not only transform information, but the physical systems that shape everyday life.
If you want to work on hard problems with real-world impact, join us.
About the role
We are hiring a Senior Director, Mining Autonomy Platform Engineering to lead the team that owns the platform beneath our autonomous mining products.
**What you’ll do
- Retrofit and integration architecture. Own the architecture of the autonomy installation across supported trucks, including electrical architecture, harness design, mounting, sensor and compute placement, and power. Define what is common across trucks and what is configured per model, and maintain a documented integration path for a new truck type.
- Bring-up and commissioning engineering. Own the build instructions, drawings, procedures, and commissioning gates that installations run against. Act as the engineering escalation point for field teams and convert escalations into documented design and process changes.
- Off-machine validation. Build and own the bench and simulation capability that allows releases to be validated against real truck interfaces. Own the correlation between bench behavior and truck behavior, including where the two diverge.
- Reliability, diagnostics, and fleet measurement. Own availability, utilization, and subsystem failure-rate measurement, including fault attribution. Set diagnostics requirements for new hardware, and run root-cause and corrective-action discipline on field failures.