Chief Technology Officer (Autonomous Systems)

Chief Technology Officer The Opportunity Our Client is building technology for autonomous systems operating in complex, real-world environments, combining autonomy, robotics, AI, distributed systems, edge computing, and multi-agent coordination. We are looking for a Chief Technology Officer who is both a technical leader and a strategic builder . This person will define the company’s technical direction, shape its architecture and product strategy, and turn advanced technology into a meaningful competitive advantage. This is not a traditional CTO role focused primarily on managing an engineering organization. The ideal candidate has personally helped architect, build, and deploy sophisticated autonomy, robotics, AI, or other complex cyber-physical systems into production. You will work closely with the CEO and executive team while serving as the company’s senior technical voice with customers, investors, government organizations, strategic partners, and the broader technology community. What You'll Do Technical Vision & Architecture Define and own Our Client's long-term technical vision and architecture. Establish the technical principles, standards, and architectural direction needed to scale. Lead major architecture and technology decisions across autonomy, robotics, AI, distributed systems, edge computing, and real-time systems. Identify where technology can create a meaningful and defensible competitive advantage . Balance technical excellence with scalability, reliability, security, cost, and speed of execution. Technology, Product & Business Strategy Partner with the CEO, product, and engineering leadership to translate company strategy into a clear technical roadmap. Connect technology decisions directly to customer needs and commercial outcomes . Determine where to build, buy, partner, or invest. Identify and eliminate technical risks that could affect product delivery, customer commitments, or growth. Ensure complex systems move successfully from R&D into reliable production deployment . Provide executive oversight of architecture, technical execution, reliability, and scalability. External Leadership Represent Our Client as a highly credible technical leader with customers, investors, government organizations, defense organizations, and strategic partners. Clearly communicate complex technology, architecture, differentiation, and roadmap to both technical and non-technical audiences. Build confidence in the company's technology and long-term technical vision. Develop relationships with technical leaders across industry, academia, government, and strategic partners. Help establish Our Client as a technical leader in autonomous systems, robotics, and AI. Technical Organization Recruit, develop, and retain exceptional technical talent. Establish a high technical quality bar across the organization. Mentor senior engineering and technical leaders. Help define the technical organization and leadership structure required as the company scales. Build an organization where strong architecture and technical decision-making can scale beyond the CTO. Executive Partnership Act as a close strategic partner to the CEO. Bring independent technical judgment to company-level decisions. Translate technical capabilities into business opportunities and strategic differentiation. Assess technical opportunities, partnerships, acquisitions, and investments. Help define where Our Client can establish a durable technical moat . What We're Looking For The strongest candidates will have substantial experience building and deploying complex systems in the real world, with experience in areas such as: Autonomous systems Robotics AI / Machine Learning Autonomous vehicles UAV / UAS Defense robotics Industrial robotics Unmanned systems Distributed robotic fleets Complex cyber-physical systems You should have experience architecting across multiple technical domains, potentially including: Perception and computer vision Planning and control Sensor fusion Multi-agent coordination Distributed systems Networking Simulation Edge computing Embedded systems Real-time and latency-sensitive systems You do not need to be the deepest expert in every domain. You do need the technical breadth and systems-level judgment to understand how these technologies work together as a complete product. Production & Real-World Deployment We are particularly interested in leaders who have taken sophisticated technology from concept and R&D through production and real-world deployment . Experience should include some combination of: Operating systems in challenging or degraded environments. Edge computing and constrained infrastructure. Limited-bandwidth or intermittent connectivity. Embedded compute platforms. Field or tactical environments. Hardware/software integration. Sensors, actuators, and control systems. Production monitoring and observability. CI/CD and automated testing. Simulation-driven testing. Reliability engineering and failure recovery. Versioned deployments and release management. The key distinction is real-world production experience rather than purely research-oriented work . Preferred Experience The following would be highly valuable: Reinforcement learning for robotics. Multi-agent reinforcement learning. Simulation-to-real systems. Computer vision and object detection/tracking. AI planning and decision systems. Large-scale ML architectures. Graph neural networks or attention-based architectures. Edge AI and on-device inference. NVIDIA Jetson or embedded GPU platforms. Defense, government, military, or highly constrained operating environments. Defense or government experience is valuable, but not mandatory . Leadership Profile You are: Deeply technical and credible with senior engineers. A systems thinker who understands complex technology end-to-end. A strategic leader who connects technology to business outcomes. Comfortable making high-impact decisions with incomplete information. An exceptional communicator who can explain complex technology clearly. Credible with engineers, customers, investors, government stakeholders, and partners. Pragmatic about balancing technical excellence with speed and execution. An exceptional talent magnet who can attract senior technical leaders. Comfortable taking ownership for technical outcomes , rather than simply providing advice. What Success Looks Like Success in this role means Our Client has: A clear, scalable technical architecture. Meaningful and defensible technical differentiation. Strong alignment between technology, product, engineering, and commercial strategy. Increasingly sophisticated autonomous systems successfully deployed in the real world. Strong technical credibility with customers, investors, government organizations, and strategic partners. An exceptional technical leadership team and engineering organization. A technology platform and organization that can scale without depending entirely on the CTO. The Ideal Candidate The ideal candidate is more than an engineering executive . They are a deeply technical systems thinker who has built and deployed sophisticated autonomous, robotic, AI, or cyber-physical systems, understands how to turn technical capability into commercial advantage, and can represent that technology with credibility at the highest levels. They can debate architecture with a Principal Engineer, shape strategy with the CEO, explain technical differentiation to an investor, and discuss deployment requirements with a government or defense customer. This is an opportunity to help define what Our Client builds, why it matters, and why the company is uniquely positioned to win.