Senior Technical Integration Lead – Robotics & Drones

Senior Technical Integration Lead - Robotics & Drones

We are Aptiv - a global technology company with 200,000 specialists in 48 countries. We develop innovative software and build the hardware to bring autonomous driving cars, advanced driver-assistance systems, connected vehicles and smart cities to life in a way that only we can.

We are building a new Robotics business at Aptiv, focused on Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) and Drones for warehouse, industrial, and adjacent markets.

As a Senior Technical Integration Lead Engineer, you will lead the integration, validation, and demonstration of Aptiv's latest software and hardware technologies across advanced robotics, drone, and autonomous platform applications. This highly visible role serves as the technical bridge between research, product development, and customer demonstrations, ensuring complex systems operate reliably in real-world environments.

You will work closely with AI/ML engineers, perception teams, systems engineers, validation engineers, and platform developers to integrate cutting-edge sensing, compute, and autonomy technologies into robotic and aerial platforms. Success in this role requires strong technical leadership, hands-on troubleshooting skills, and the ability to drive cross-functional teams toward flawless customer demonstrations and performance evaluations.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & System Integration

• Lead the integration, bring-up, and deployment of advanced Aptiv technologies on robotics, drone, and autonomous platform demonstrators.
• Serve as the technical lead for hardware and software integration activities, ensuring system readiness for demonstrations, customer evaluations, and field testing.
• Drive end-to-end system checkout, debugging, and validation across sensing, compute, communications, and autonomy functions.
• Provide technical leadership and guidance to engineers and technicians supporting integration, testing, and demonstration activities.
• Establish and execute integration strategies that ensure robust performance across diverse operating environments and use cases.

Testing, Validation & Demonstrations

• Lead demonstration planning, execution, and support activities, ensuring successful customer-facing events and technology evaluations.
• Develop test strategies, schedules, procedures, and acceptance criteria for integrated robotics and drone systems.
• Lead system-level testing, issue investigation, root cause analysis, and corrective action implementation.
• Analyze system performance data and communicate results, risks, and recommendations to technical and business stakeholders.
• Design, execute, and document benchmarking activities to evaluate system performance against customer requirements and competitive solutions.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with AI/ML, perception, systems, software, hardware, and validation teams to ensure technologies are properly integrated and optimized.
• Collaborate with project managers and product leaders to prioritize deliverables, manage risks, and align technical activities with program objectives.
• Coordinate activities across global engineering teams to effectively utilize resources and meet project milestones.
• Work closely with internal stakeholders and external customers to define demonstration objectives, success criteria, and system requirements.
• Interface with strategic partners, technology suppliers, and customer engineering teams during integration and demonstration activities.

Process & Continuous Improvement

• Drive improvements in integration processes, validation methodologies, and demonstration readiness practices.
• Identify opportunities to improve quality, efficiency, repeatability, and scalability of integration workflows.
• Support technology pursuits, customer engagements, and pre-production development programs.
• Promote adoption of common architectures, integration standards, and best practices across robotics and autonomous platform projects.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Robotics, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Aerospace Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years of experience developing, integrating, or validating complex robotics, autonomous systems, drones, or embedded software platforms.
• Demonstrated experience leading multidisciplinary integration efforts involving hardware, software, sensing, and compute platforms.
• Strong understanding of embedded systems, system architectures, networking, and real-time software constraints.
• Experience with system bring-up, debugging, troubleshooting, and root cause analysis in field or laboratory environments.
• Excellent communication, leadership, and stakeholder management skills.
• Ability to travel to customer sites, field test locations, and demonstration events as required.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with autonomous systems, mobile robotics, unmanned aerial systems (UAS), autonomous mobile robots (AMR), or intelligent vehicle platforms.
• Hands-on experience with robotics middleware such as ROS or ROS 2.
• Experience integrating perception systems including cameras, radar, lidar, GNSS, IMU, and other environmental sensors.
• Familiarity with AI/ML-enabled autonomy and perception systems.
• Experience with Linux-based development environments and embedded software platforms.
• Knowledge of wireless communications, networking, telemetry, and remote operations.
• Experience with simulation, digital twins, software-in-the-loop (SIL), hardware-in-the-loop (HIL), or data replay environments.
• Experience working with heterogeneous compute platforms including GPU, NPU, FPGA, or DSP architectures.
• Experience supporting customer demonstrations, prototypes, proof-of-concepts, and advanced development programs.
• Ability to thrive in fast-paced, rapidly evolving, and highly collaborative engineering environments.

Traits we seek:

• Systems Thinkers who understand how data flows through complex robotics and AI/ML ecosystems.
• Ownership Mentality with a strong focus on reliability, quality, and operational excellence.
• Automation Advocates who eliminate manual processes through scalable engineering solutions.
• Data-Driven Problem Solvers who use metrics and evidence to drive improvements.

Collaborative Influencers who effectively work across software, ML, robotics, and infrastructure teams

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Aptiv is an equal employment opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.