The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) accelerates the Department’s adoption of commercial technology by identifying, prototyping, fielding, and scaling capabilities that address urgent operational needs.
The Autonomous Warfare Technical Director is the portfolio’s senior technical leader for autonomous warfare hardware, software, and enabling technologies across air, ground, and maritime domains. The role ensures programs are technically credible, operationally relevant, scalable, interoperable, and capable of transitioning from prototype to scaled production and sustained use.
This is not a research-only or advisory position. The Technical Director shapes portfolio strategy, evaluates technologies and architectures, helps establish engineering standards, identifies and mitigates technical risks and hazards, and works directly with Program Managers, operators, program offices, and commercial engineering teams to execute these responsibilities.
DIU strongly prefers candidates who have built, integrated, deployed, or scaled production-grade autonomous systems—not solely laboratory prototypes or controlled
demonstrations. The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise, commercial product experience, systems thinking, and operational judgment.
· Drives technical execution and shepherding of portfolio programs, takes active ownership of engineering milestones, design reviews, and technical blocker resolution to ensure the successful integration and delivery of autonomous warfare hardware, software, and enabling technologies.
● Advise and oversee programs from problem definition and market assessment through testing, transition, and fielding.
● Evaluate commercial systems and companies for technical maturity, reliability, differentiation, scalability, integration risk, and operational relevance.
● Assess autonomy hardware and software stacks, including sensing, perception, localization, planning, control, communications, compute, data, safety, and human-machine interfaces.
● Develop technical requirements, reference architectures, evaluation criteria, test approaches, data strategies, and transition standards.
● Ensure testing produces credible evidence on performance, robustness, reliability, safety, usability, interoperability, and mission effectiveness.
● Distinguish production-ready systems from demonstration-level capabilities by examining edge cases, failure modes, operator burden, sustainment, and deployment constraints.
● Engage commercial technical leaders to challenge assumptions, resolve engineering barriers, and accelerate delivery.
● Mentor technical staff and raise the portfolio’s overall technical rigor.
Requirements
Competitive candidates will demonstrate most of the following:
● Deep expertise in autonomy, robotics, AI, or related fields.
● Meaningful commercial or government experience developing and delivering autonomous or robotic products and capabilities.
● Experience fielding production-grade systems that operate reliably outside of controlled environments.
● Strong technical judgment across perception, planning, control, communications, compute, data, platforms, and operators.
● Experience defining requirements, designing tests, analyzing performance, and making evidence-based technical decisions.
● Understanding of production engineering practices, including configuration management, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), reliability, quality assurance, cybersecurity, release processes, risk management, and sustainment.
● Ability to communicate effectively with engineers, operators, executives, acquisition professionals, and senior government leaders.
● U.S. citizenship and possession of, or eligibility for, a Top Secret clearance.
● Willingness to travel approximately 30 percent.
● Technically authoritative: Independently evaluates complex systems and earns credibility with senior engineers.
● Systems oriented: Assesses the full capability rather than isolated components.
● Production focused: Prioritizes reliability, scalability, maintainability, and repeatable operational performance over impressive demonstrations.
● Commercially experienced: Understands product development, engineering tradeoffs, technical roadmaps, capital constraints, and company incentives.
● Operationally grounded: Connects technical decisions to mission conditions, user behavior, and the consequences of failure.
● Experience with unmanned systems, autonomous vehicles, industrial robotics, or other complex cyber-physical systems.
● Previously a CTO, chief engineer, engineering director, technical product leader, principal roboticist, or similar role.
● Expertise in collaborative autonomy, multi-agent coordination, distributed systems, or human-machine teaming.
● Deployment of autonomous systems in safety-critical, mission-critical, degraded, or communications-constrained environments.
● Experience with simulation, synthetic data, hardware- or software-in-the-loop testing, and continuous verification.
● Familiarity with modular open architectures, interoperability standards, data rights, and third-party integration.
● Experience assessing manufacturing readiness, supplier quality, producibility, and scaling constraints.
● Familiarity with DoD testing, safety, cybersecurity, certification, acquisition, or operational approval processes.
This role is best suited for a senior technical leader who can move comfortably between an architecture review, test event, production line, startup engineering discussion, operational unit, and senior leader briefing.
Strong candidates understand that successful demonstrations are not the same as deployable products. They look beyond nominal performance to reliability, edge cases, integration complexity, operator burden, sustainment, cybersecurity, manufacturing, and continuous improvement.
Most importantly, they are motivated to ensure autonomous systems delivered to the joint force are not merely innovative, but reliable, scalable, and operationally consequential.
Benefits
EEO Statement
Advanced Automation Corporation is an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, gender, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a protected veteran, or status as a qualified individual with a disability.
AAC is a team of specialized engineers and multi-disciplined experts.
Systems Engineering (SE) is our Heritage. It’s in our DNA and we incorporate SE principles into everything we do for our government and corporate clients. We are all holistic thinkers. We are also pioneers and avid users of simulation and modeling technology tools.
AAC is making a difference in the pursuit of our National Defense. Our focus is at both the Systems and Human levels.
At the Systems Level, AAC helps government and industry clients within the aerospace-defense sector solve mission-critical problems and develop lifecycle sustainment strategies, also helping them develop new possibilities for innovation throughout the process. We are experts in the Federal Acquisition System and help our clients navigate its complexity. We apply advanced economic and financial modeling to help clients make knowledge-based decisions and drive their business/mission strategy with confidence.
At the Human Level, AAC develops customized training programs and conducts training on a diverse range of engineering subjects, applying automation and innovation to both the content and delivery of instruction. We’ are also making a difference on the ground, where we enable warfighters and others to operate more effectively in cross-cultural environments. AAC’s network of international resources is available to address issues of cultural intelligence, conflict resolution, localization, translation, and interpretation, almost anywhere in the world.
AAC’s Mission and Core Values are understood and shared by all of our people.
