Founding Venture CTO responsible for the complete technical direction of a retrofit autonomy startup for heavy industrial equipment. Leads field discovery, system architecture, safety engineering, machine integration, autonomy software, supplier decisions, hiring, budgeting, and deployment. The role takes autonomous systems from prototype through controlled-site testing and supervised customer pilots, while building a brand-agnostic platform across machine manufacturers. Requires hands-on robotics expertise, vehicle integration experience, functional safety knowledge, and the ability to lead a core engineering team.
About the role
Vantora 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.
Vantora 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.
You 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.
You’ll build with our partner’s machines, engineering teams and customers close at hand: access most autonomy startups spend years fighting for.
This 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.
What You’ll Do
You own the technical agenda end to end: what we build, how it’s built, who builds it, and getting it safely into the field.
Discovery & problem definition:
- Lead the technical side of field discovery across a range of job-site types
- Assess ‘automation-readiness’ of various machine types, workflows and ancillary equipment and how they would work together as a system
- Evaluate the technology landscape (e.g. retrofit kits, OEM-native systems, teleoperation and supervised autonomy approaches)
- Test the riskiest assumptions on real machines early, starting with the machine control interface
- Recommend the first application, with feasibility, cost-to-build and kit-cost estimates the GM and partner can invest against
Architecture & safety:
- Define the reference architecture for a retrofit, brand-agnostic stack: machine interface, sensing and compute, autonomy software, remote supervision, and data and test infrastructure
- Make the early build-vs-buy-vs-license calls, including whether to build on existing autonomy software, and choose the suppliers behind them
- Set the kit targets that make retrofit a business: hardware cost, install time and serviceability across machine makes and vintages
- Own 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)
Team:
- Hire and lead the core engineering team across integration and hardware, autonomy software, safety and field operations
- Decide what to hire and what to contract
- Set the engineering culture, standards and ways of working for a co-located team that tests on real machines every week
Technical delivery, from prototype to field:
- Own the technical roadmap, budget and delivery across parallel workstreams: vehicle integration and hardware, autonomy software, safety and validation, and field operations
- Take the system from drive-by-wire to a repeatable prototype on a controlled site, then to supervised pilots on live customer sites
- Prove the brand-agnostic approach by bringing the same stack to a second manufacturer’s machine
- Set the stage gates and metrics that show technical readiness
- Be the technical counterpart to our partner’s engineering teams on machine interfaces, data, test machines and safety reviews
What You Bring:
You 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.
- 8+ 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)
- Experience leading a team that took autonomy from prototype to field deployment on real machines, outside a lab or simulator
- Deep expertise in at least one core area (perception, localization, motion planning or controls) and working fluency across the full stack, hardware included
- Hands-on vehicle and machine integration (e.g. drive-by-wire, CAN/J1939, electro-hydraulic controls, ruggedized sensing and compute)
- A track record of hiring strong engineers, ideally including people you’ve shipped with who might join you
- Sound build-vs-buy judgment, and experience managing suppliers, contractors and a technical budget
- Working knowledge of functional safety for autonomous machines and how safety cases are built
- Clear communication of trade-offs and risk to executives and partner engineering teams, including when something isn’t ready
Nice to Haves:
- Background in machine learning approaches to manipulation or task learning for articulated machines
- Integrating autonomy across multiple machine brands or vintages
- Teleoperation or remote-supervision systems
- Multi-machine coordination or fleet orchestration
- Working with, or inside, an equipment OEM or large industrial partner
- Founding or early-stage start-up experience
Location & Travel
- Location: Los Angeles or San Francisco Bay Area
- Work Environment: On-site with a co-located engineering team
- Travel: 25-50%; job sites, partner facilities and test grounds
UP.Labs San Carlos, California, USA Office
655 Skyway Rd., San Carlos, CA, United States, 94070
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