Autonomous Warfare Technical Director

I. Role Overview

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.

II. Core Responsibilities

· 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

• I. Required Background
• 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.
• II. Primary Attributes
• ● 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.
• III. Preferred Experience
• ● 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.
• IV. Who Thrives in This Role

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.