SteerAI is an autonomous mobility technology company powered by Venture One, the commercialization arm of the Advanced Technology Research Council. SteerAI’s advanced AI-powered autonomy stack, developed by the Technology Innovation Institute, empowers the logistics and defense industries by turning industrial vehicles into autonomous powerhouses that can handle complex off-road missions, transform operations and protect organizations' most important assets: their workforce.
About the roleSteerAI builds off-road autonomy for defense: ground vehicles and robots that perceive, plan, and operate in unstructured, GPS-degraded, and contested terrain. We are seeking a Principal Systems Engineer to serve as the senior technical steward for systems engineering across our autonomy programs and to lead the Systems and Design team of systems engineers and systems architects. You will be ultimately responsible for systems engineering across the company, writing and driving the system requirements across the autonomy stack, our unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and our command and control (C2) systems.
In this role you will drive the systems engineering at SteerAI, including establishing the standards, processes, and rigor that scale across multiple programs. You will work as a hands-on technical leader, setting requirements and architectural direction, mentoring engineers, and partnering with the Growth and Product teams to translate customer and mission requirements into fielded capability.
Key Responsibilities- Systems Engineering Ownership: Take ultimate responsibility for systems engineering at SteerAI, owning and evolving the architecture for our off-road autonomous systems and ensuring designs meet performance, reliability, safety, and survivability goals across a range of mission profiles and platforms.
- Systems Engineering Standards (Org-Wide): Define and govern the systems engineering practice across products and programs, covering requirements management, interface control, verification and validation strategy, MBSE methodology, and architecture review gates, so that rigor and traceability scale as the company grows.
- Team Leadership: Lead the Systems and Design team of systems engineers and systems architects. Set technical direction, allocate work across programs, develop the team’s capabilities, and hold accountability for the quality and consistency of systems engineering deliverables.
- System Requirements and Traceability: Author and drive the top-level system requirements across the full autonomy stack, our unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and our command and control (C2) systems. Establish and maintain the system and subsystem requirements (SRS, ICDs) that flow from top-level system requirements so they are clear, traceable, and verifiable, owning the requirements lifecycle from elicitation through validation against mission needs.
- Model- based Systems Engineering (MBSE): Drive adoption of SysML and MBSE to model system behavior, structure, and interfaces, creating an authoritative system model that anchors design decisions and cross-team alignment.
- Risk, Safety, and Assurance: Partner with the safety and cybersecurity teams to drive system-level risk management and safety case development, applying functional safety and autonomy assurance standards such as ISO 26262, ISO 21448 (SOTIF), and UL 4600, along with applicable defense and regulatory requirements for autonomous and unmanned ground systems.
- Prototyping, Verification, and Field Test: Define the verification and validation strategy spanning simulation, hardware-in-the-loop and software-in-the-loop testing, and real-world field testing. Guide prototype development and test campaigns against defined requirements and performance indicators in representative off-road environments.
- Customer and Program Support: Work alongside the Growth and Product teams to support proposals, technical reviews (SRR, PDR, CDR), capability demonstrations, and roadmaps, translating customer and mission requirements into executable engineering plans.
- Technical Mentorship: Mentor other systems engineers and adjacent disciplines, strengthening systems thinking, design…
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