Principal Engineer - Autonomous Systems (m/f/d)

What we offer

Work in an international, agile and ambitious team creating the future of autonomous systems. Grow your career in an expanding and ambitious engineering team, building innovative products using state-of-the-art technologies in AI, robotics, and autonomy.

Your mission

Join Autonomous Teaming Solutions and build next-generation autonomous robotic systems for demanding real-world environments. You will take end-to-end technical ownership and responsibility of a mission-critical robotics product where perception, system performance, and reliability directly impact operational success.

As Principal Engineer, you carry overall technical responsibility. You have the final word on architecture, integration and deployment — and you carry the consequences when the system fails. No project manager above you: you decide, you deliver. You work directly with company leadership, not as a career step, but because you are the deepest technically. Your place is still in the team: building, not reporting.

• You own a complex autonomous system end-to-end, from architecture to field deployment.
• You build solutions yourself, every day, in the code, next to your team. With us, leading means going first.
• You are the tiebreaker on technical decisions across all subsystems.
• You cut whatever does not pay into the next milestone, before you optimize.
• You test in the field, with measurable and clear pass/fail criteria.

Your profile

You are a builder. You have already put things into the world: systems, products, projects with real users. Not just planned, not conceptualized — built. You have built something of your own before: a company, a product, a project with no one standing behind you. You know what real responsibility feels like.

• Deep knowledge in real-time embedded systems, sensor fusion, or perception, proven by systems that run and make a difference.
• You have taken something from zero to running hardware and software solutions, solely responsible, with numbers to show for it.
• C++ and ROS2 under a latency budget is your terrain.
• Your first reaction to a new requirement is to ask whether it can be dropped.
• You have made engineers better by building next to them and coaching them.
• You build in your own time too, because you cannot do otherwise.

What else

Citizenship of a NATO member country or close ally.

Why us?

How we work: Clear ownership, everything else is bureaucracy. Every system has exactly one owner with the final word. No V-model, no phase gates, no sign-off meetings. Requirements get challenged, not worked through. Delete first, then simplify, then accelerate — in that order. Our milestones are binary; testing happens in the field, not in simulation.

What you get:

• Full technical authority over a system in active deployment.
• Direct contact with the customer, no layers in between.
• A team that owns the mission itself.
• Munich, 5 days on-site — we build together.

No job for you if:

• You need three meetings before a decision gets made.
• You want a title — what we hand out is the final word and full consequence.
• A good design matters more to you than a running, functional system.