Autonomous Vehicle Engineer III

Textron•Hunt Valley, MD

About The Position

Textron Systems’ Sea, Air & Land Systems business area is seeking a mid-level Autonomy Engineer to develop and integrate autonomous capabilities for defense systems across air, land, maritime, weapons, and multi-domain environments. The engineer will help translate mission needs and operational concepts into implementable autonomy designs, working across the autonomy stack to capture designs, define interfaces, decompose functions, evaluate technology insertions, and support integration into systems operating in operationally relevant environments. The role involves collaboration with software, hardware, controls, robotics, navigation, human factors, test, program, and customer teams. Work includes engineering existing capabilities as well as exploring new concepts, tools, and methods. The engineer will support autonomy development through analysis, prototyping, design, integration, demonstrations, and formal testing, while contributing to project engineering and coordination across technical teams.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, robotics, aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, or a related technical discipline.
At least 4 years of professional experience developing, integrating, testing, evaluating, or fielding autonomous, robotic, intelligent, or highly automated systems.
Demonstrated experience contributing to system or software architecture, functional decomposition, interface definition, design documentation, or technical baselines for complex systems.
Applied design and evaluation experience in areas such as sensing, perception, inference, state estimation, machine learning, behavior development, task planning, simulations, multi-agent teaming, and edge processing.
Experience using structured engineering methods to evaluate designs or technologies through analysis, simulation, experimentation, testing, or operationally relevant demonstrations.
Ability to clearly communicate technical concepts through design documents, diagrams, briefings or presentations, trade studies, test plans, and technical recommendations.
Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Security Clearance.

Nice To Haves

Experience with defense systems, mission planning, command and control, navigation, electronic warfare, communications, weapons, or autonomous platform integration.
Experience with perception or estimation technologies such as computer vision, radar, lidar, electro-optical or infrared sensing, probabilistic inference, tracking, mapping, or sensor fusion.
Experience with machine learning development or deployment, including data preparation, model evaluation, edge inference, robustness, or performance monitoring.
Experience in the design and evaluation of agentic architectures.
Experience with ROS 2, MATLAB/Simulink, Python, C++, Rust, JavaScript, TypeScript, Gazebo, Unreal, Unity, or other robotics, simulation, autonomy, and software development environments.
Experience in Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) tools and methods.
Project engineering experience with planning, tracking, risk, and action item management.

Responsibilities

Lead the development and realization of autonomous system capabilities through analysis, prototyping, design, integration, demonstrations, and formal test activities.
Identify and evaluate emerging technologies and concepts for applicability in product designs and capability roadmaps.
Translate mission objectives, operational concepts, scenarios, and constraints into autonomy functions, behaviors, performance measures, and testable technical objectives and requirements.
Conduct trade studies, structured evaluations, experiments, modeling and simulation, and prototype assessments to compare technology approaches against measurable operational and technical criteria.
Contribute to project engineering activities, including technical planning, estimates, schedules, risks, dependencies, work products, reviews, and coordination across technical teams.