Most search firms can work one side of that line. They come from software, and the board designer is a foreign language to them; or they come from hardware, and the autonomy stack is. An autonomous product does not respect that line. Neither do we.
One company, every group
Our current autonomy engagement is a Cambridge company building first-of-its-kind autonomy software. It is also something the technology description alone misses: a funded startup fighting for its existence. The next round, the next milestone, the product working in the field — none of that is guaranteed, and every hire is made against that clock.
We are helping them build it the way autonomy actually gets built: across all of their groups at once.
- Autonomy software development — the engineers writing the software that perceives, decides, and acts.
- Hardware development — the engineers building the machines the software runs on.
- Board design — electrical engineers designing the boards at the center of the system; our current search there is running with a deep pipeline of candidates, because the profile is rare and the bar is specific.
- Test — the engineers who prove the system does what it claims, before it has to.
That breadth is the point. An autonomy team is a single system: a perception hire who can't work with the hardware team's constraints is a mis-hire, and a board designer who doesn't understand the software's demands is another. Staffing the groups separately, from separate firms, is how companies end up with four strong teams that don't fit together. We staff them as one engagement, calibrated against the same question, so the people arrive already fitting the whole.
The hidden Rosetta Stone
Finding the engineers is only half the work. The other half — the part clients rarely see on a proposal, and the part that decides whether the hires actually work — is the logic and strategy we bring to what kind of people to hire in the first place.
A funded startup fighting for its existence does not need the same people a settled company needs, even for the same job title. That shows up most clearly when a company says it wants R&D-oriented people. The instinct is understandable: the work is new, the problems are unsolved, so hire researchers.
We will often suggest the opposite. Hire scrappy, startup-oriented veterans — people who have delivered hard technology before with minimized resources, who expect the plan to change, and who know how to pivot without losing the thread of what has to ship. A brilliant R&D hire who needs a large team, a long runway, and stable assumptions will struggle in a company where the assumptions break monthly and the resources are what there are. A veteran who has built under those conditions will not.
That judgment — when to follow the brief and when to change the brief — is not a search technique. It comes from having grown up around product development and from calibrating every search the same way: a year from now, what worked? For a startup fighting for its existence, what worked is rarely the most credentialed hire. It is the hire who delivered.
The roles
- Autonomy Software Engineers
- Perception and Computer Vision Engineers
- Machine Learning Engineers, Autonomy
- Robotics Software Engineers (C++)
- Electrical Engineers — Board Design
- Hardware Engineers
- Test and Systems Engineers
- Simulation Leads
How an autonomy search runs here
It starts with calibration, not a job description: if this placement is a success a year from now, what will we be pointing to that really worked? In autonomy that question has teeth, because the disciplines borrow each other's vocabulary — everyone can say sensor fusion; the follow-up questions are where knowledge separates from talk, and we can ask them because product development, not IT, is the world this firm grew up in. Calibration is also where the startup question gets settled: does this role need a researcher, or does it need a veteran who can pivot and deliver with what the company actually has? Getting that answer wrong is the most expensive hiring mistake a young autonomy company can make.
Then the search runs on the Inbound Recruitment Playbook — plan, attract, evaluate, interview, deliver, hire, retain — with candidates measured against the success profile rather than against each other, and acceptance verified before any offer is put in writing, so offers land instead of expiring in negotiation.
Start with the question
Every autonomy search we run starts with one question: a year from now, what worked? Tell us where you're headed and we'll tell you honestly whether we're the right firm to get you there. If we're not, we'll tell you who is.
Current openings, in this practice and otherwise, live on the jobs page — that is the one place they stay current.