Principal Engineer – Autonomous Systems

About The Role

Integer Technologies is currently hiring a Principal Engineer for Autonomous Systems. The Principal Engineer serves as a senior technical contributor and portfolio-wide subject-matter expert across a growing portfolio of applied research programs focused on multi-domain uncrewed and autonomous systems in the maritime environment. The Principal Engineer may be the principal investigator for sponsored research programs. Importantly, however, the Principal Engineer is not tied to a single program — this role is designed to provide senior technical guidance across programs to solve the hardest technical problems, prototype the most challenging capabilities, and unblock research teams when specialized expertise is required.

Ideal candidates bring both depth and breadth. They can dive deeply into a single critical area — sensor processing, perception algorithm design, modeling and simulation, edge deployment of ML models, or software architecture — when a program needs concentrated effort, and they can move fluidly across those areas when the portfolio needs versatility.

Integer is a science and technology research and development organization. As such, much of our work entails developing solutions for complex problems that presently have no known solutions. The Principal Engineer must be able to perform hands‑on research, understand new concepts from other engineering disciplines on advanced and complex topics, and document findings in a way that is easy for non-experts to understand.

While this is primarily an individual‑contributor role, the Principal Engineer is expected to informally mentor junior and mid‑career engineers across the portfolio and have a significant technical role in proposals and business development activities.

Serve as a portfolio-wide technical subject-matter expert in one or more of the following areas, with the versatility to contribute across all of them:

• Modeling, simulation, and digital engineering environments for autonomous maritime systems
• Perception algorithm design for surface and subsea vehicles — computer vision, sonar and acoustic classification, sensor fusion
• Edge‑deployed sensor processing and on‑platform inference under power, bandwidth, and comms constraints
• Software architecture, development, and deployment for embedded and edge autonomous platforms
• State estimation, data fusion, and adaptive sensor management
• Contribute technical content to proposals and business development. Author technical approach sections for white papers and proposals. Support the company in scoping new efforts. Occasionally participate in customer engagement meetings where deep technical credibility is required.
• Represent Integer’s technical work externally through publications, conference presentations, and technical exchanges with government sponsors, academic partners, and industry collaborators.
• Drive technical execution on the highest‑risk, highest‑payoff research problems across the company’s Mission Autonomy portfolio. Contribute to programs based on where deep technical expertise is most needed and produce demonstrable capability advances at a regular cadence.
• Serve as a technical resource and informal mentor to junior and mid‑career engineers across the portfolio. Coach engineers on how to structure hard problems and help other principal investigators think through technical trade‑offs.

• Must be a U.S. Citizen with the ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. DoD Secret Clearance.
• Experience with autonomous or uncrewed maritime systems (UUVs, USVs), or applicable experience in adjacent domains (UAS, ground robotics, space autonomy) that translates to maritime problems.
• Demonstrated ability to shape and capture funding for new science and technology (S&T) programs related to maritime autonomous systems with Department of War (DoW) sponsors, such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Office of Naval Research (ONR), or similar.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Ocean Engineering, or related field, with 10+ years of relevant…