Manager, Planning & Execution

Seegrid•Pittsburgh, PA

16h•Hybrid

About The Position

The Planning and Execution team at Seegrid is responsible for delivering robust robotics primitives to enable product features and capabilities associated with our enterprise material handling solutions. As the Manager of Planning and Execution, you will lead a team of talented software engineers responsible for developing production grade C++ solutions for truck motion and behavior execution. Under your leadership, the team will develop modular extensible discrete subsystems such as global path planning, coordinated object detection and manipulation, local (trajectory) controllers, and behavioral execution. You will ensure seamless cross-functional collaboration, helping your team integrate with Perception, Fleet, and Truck application software teams. You will guide technical leads on larger projects, mentor engineers to own components in the planning and execution stack, and ensure the team effectively gathers requirements from stakeholders. This position is preferably based out of our Pittsburgh, PA HQ.

Requirements

Agile Leadership: Experience leading software engineering teams through Agile development methodologies (Scrum, Kanban), managing sprint planning, stand-ups, and retrospectives.
Engineering Best Practices : Solid understanding of modern software engineering best practices, including CI/CD pipelines, test-driven development (TDD), version control (Git), and rigorous code review standards.
Team Development: Track record of recruiting top talent, conducting performance reviews, holding regular 1-on-1s, and actively guiding the career growth and technical development of direct reports.
Cross-Functional Communications: Ability to translate complex technical constraints into clear business impacts, serving as a bridge between engineering and Product Management (PdM).
Technical Project Management: Experience balancing feature delivery with technical debt management, resource allocation, and timeline estimation for complex, interdependent robotics subsystems.
Safety & Quality Focus: Commitment to a culture of safety, quality, and reliability, essential for deploying autonomous vehicles into real-world production facilities.
BS/MS/PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, or related field
5+ years of relevant professional experience
Strong technical foundation with C++ and experience with Python to effectively mentor and review your team's work
Experience in working on autonomous agents in any field (e.g., Game Development, Robotics, Defense, Manufacturing, Finance, etc.)
Experience in one or more of the following domains: Graph/Sample based Planning, Behavioral Planning, Decision Making, Multi-Agent Coordination, Object Manipulation.

Nice To Haves

Experience in working on autonomous vehicles in any field (e.g., AGVs, automotive, agriculture, etc.)
Experience in Linux systems programming
Experience with ROS/ROS2 or other data-centric middleware architectures
Experience with navigation and motion planning frameworks such as Nav2 and Moveit2
Experience with modern task execution frameworks such as behavior trees
Experience with simulation applications (e.g. Gazebo, Nvidia Isaac Sim, etc.)

Responsibilities

Manage, mentor, and grow a team of software engineers tasked with researching, designing, developing, and maintaining motion planning algorithms and scalable task/behavior execution frameworks.
Collaborate with partners including Product Management, Perception, Fleet, and Truck Application SW team members to deliver robust solutions in accordance with our product roadmap.
Ensure best practices regarding software design and development are followed.
Ensure high engineering standards by overseeing the development of unit, module, and system level tests, and fostering a culture of rigorous code reviews among peers.
Guide the team in developing reusable modules that can be composed to solve material handling tasks
Drive initiatives to profile and optimize runtime performance.
Manage on-call rotations in support of software releases and facility installations