{"id":2001312,"url":"https://alion.io/job/vantora-venture-cto-robotics-autonomy","title":"Venture CTO (Robotics & Autonomy)","company":{"id":3862745,"name":"Vantora","domain":"vantora.us","url":"https://alion.io/company/vantora-2","size_band":"501-1000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Gem","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":88,"open_postings":14,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.5,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-25T05:49:26Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"head","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":181000,"max_usd":339000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":2576},"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Motion Planning","optional":false},{"name":"Teleoperation","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-05T22:38:35Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-05","last_verified_at":"2026-10-25T13:15:15Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":19,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":[],"days_open":19},"description":"About the role\nVantora is hiring a founding Venture CTO (Robotics & Autonomy) to join a new team defining, building, and launching a retrofit autonomy startup for heavy industrial equipment, in partnership with one of the largest heavy equipment OEMs in the world.\nVantora is an innovation and venture studio building new industrial technology businesses. Our lab teams work directly with large corporations to find where new technology can materially improve how work gets done, and then build it.\nYou will be one of the first two people on the team, working alongside the team's General Manager. The GM leads product strategy, operations and stakeholder management; you own the technical direction from Day 1. Together you will decide in which environments autonomy creates the most value, prototype it, and put it to work in the field.\nYou’ll build with our partner’s machines, engineering teams and customers close at hand: access most autonomy startups spend years fighting for.\nThis is a founder-level player-coach role for a builder who thrives in ambiguity and moves fast from idea to experiment. Early on you’ll be hands-on, on the machine and in the code; within the year you’ll hire and lead a core engineering team, taking the system from prototype to deployment in live customer sites.\nWhat You’ll Do\nYou own the technical agenda end to end: what we build, how it’s built, who builds it, and getting it safely into the field.\nDiscovery & problem definition:\nLead the technical side of field discovery across a range of job-site types\nAssess ‘automation-readiness’ of various machine types, workflows and ancillary equipment and how they would work together as a system \nEvaluate the technology landscape (e.g. retrofit kits, OEM-native systems, teleoperation and supervised autonomy approaches)\nTest the riskiest assumptions on real machines early, starting with the machine control interface\nRecommend the first application, with feasibility, cost-to-build and kit-cost estimates the GM and partner can invest against\nArchitecture & safety:\nDefine the reference architecture for a retrofit, brand-agnostic stack: machine interface, sensing and compute, autonomy software, remote supervision, and data and test infrastructure\nMake the early build-vs-buy-vs-license calls, including whether to build on existing autonomy software, and choose the suppliers behind them\nSet the kit targets that make retrofit a business: hardware cost, install time and serviceability across machine makes and vintages\nOwn the safety case from Day 1, so safety shapes the design rather than auditing it, and set the path to relevant standards (e.g. ISO 17757, ISO 19014, ISO 13849, ISO 21815)\nTeam:\nHire and lead the core engineering team across integration and hardware, autonomy software, safety and field operations\nDecide what to hire and what to contract\nSet the engineering culture, standards and ways of working for a co-located team that tests on real machines every week\nTechnical delivery, from prototype to field:\nOwn the technical roadmap, budget and delivery across parallel workstreams: vehicle integration and hardware, autonomy software, safety and validation, and field operations\nTake the system from drive-by-wire to a repeatable prototype on a controlled site, then to supervised pilots on live customer sites\nProve the brand-agnostic approach by bringing the same stack to a second manufacturer’s machine\nSet the stage gates and metrics that show technical readiness\nBe the technical counterpart to our partner’s engineering teams on machine interfaces, data, test machines and safety reviews\nWhat You Bring:\nYou won’t be the expert in every workstream. You need depth in one, credibility across all of them, and the judgment to hire for the rest.\n8+ years building robotics or autonomous systems, including 3+ years leading engineering teams; off-road, field or industrial use-cases are a big plus (e.g. construction, mining, defense or similar)\nExperience leading a team that took autonomy from prototype to field deployment on real machines, outside a lab or simulator \nDeep expertise in at least one core area (perception, localization, motion planning or controls) and working fluency across the full stack, hardware included\nHands-on vehicle and machine integration (e.g. drive-by-wire, CAN/J1939, electro-hydraulic controls, ruggedized sensing and compute)\nA track record of hiring strong engineers, ideally including people you’ve shipped with who might join you\nSound build-vs-buy judgment, and experience managing suppliers, contractors and a technical budget\nWorking knowledge of functional safety for autonomous machines and how safety cases are built\nClear communication of trade-offs and risk to executives and partner engineering teams, including when something isn’t ready\nNice to Haves:\nBackground in machine learning approaches to manipulation or task learning for articulated machines \nIntegrating autonomy across multiple machine brands or vintages\nTeleoperation or remote-supervision systems\nMulti-machine coordination or fleet orchestration \nWorking with, or inside, an equipment OEM or large industrial partner\nFounding or early-stage start-up experience\nLocation & Travel\nLocation: Los Angeles or San Francisco Bay Area\nWork Environment: On-site with a co-located engineering team\nTravel: 25-50%; job sites, partner facilities and test grounds","description_format":"text","description_chars":5381,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":3,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["AI Agents"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-07T11:33:40Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":55,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.609,"p_room":0.9,"age_days":19,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","velocity","win:mid"],"computed_at":"2026-10-25T05:49:26Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/vantora-venture-cto-robotics-autonomy","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/vantora-venture-cto-robotics-autonomy.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-25T16:43:32Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":24154,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-26T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":3862745},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=3862745"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fvantora-venture-cto-robotics-autonomy"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fvantora-venture-cto-robotics-autonomy"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fvantora-venture-cto-robotics-autonomy"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/vantora-venture-cto-robotics-autonomy\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fvantora-venture-cto-robotics-autonomy"}]}