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

• Work in an international, agile and ambitious team creating the future of autonomous systems
• Grow your career in a expanding and ambitious engineering team
• Build innovative products using state-of-the-art technologies in AI, robotics, and autonomy 
• Benefit from a steep learning curve and continuous development
• Enjoy team events and a strong, collaborative culture

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 yourself solutions - 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.

• 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 hard- 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 coach them.
• You build in your own time too, because you cannot do otherwise.

• Citizenship of a NATO member country or close ally.

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.

• 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.

• 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.