Director of Autonomy

About Vay:

By taking a completely new approach to mobility, Vay aims to launch the first remote-controlled fleet on European public streets.

Our international, diverse, and fun team combines the best of two worlds - software and product experience from Silicon Valley and automotive hardware & safety engineering from Europe. We have our eyes set on becoming a leading mobility company and bringing Europe back to the forefront of the race to develop driverless vehicles which will solve many of today’s transportation challenges, including air pollution, traffic jams, and traffic-related deaths, high costs of transportation and long commutes.

This is very ambitious. And we can’t do it alone. So we'd love to meet you!

The Role:

Escape the winter of full autonomy and join the spring of going from teledriving to autonomy, step by step.

Vay is looking for a Director of Autonomy to lead our contrarian roll out strategy of autonomous driving supported by teleoperation. At Vay, we believe in engineering leaders who are deeply technical, fully understand the challenges their teams are facing and are able to define and execute company strategy. Our engineering leaders coach their teams to succeed, shield their teams from distractions, help them deal with ambiguity, publicly celebrate wins and have an extreme sense of urgency to get stuff done.

As Director of Autonomy at Vay, you will be leading our Autonomy team, currently a small but fierce team made up of incredible engineers. This team is primarily focused on building the fundamental layers and components for Vay’s autonomous vehicle stack for our driverless fleet. You will own the Autonomy roadmap which will first increase the safety of our teledriving service and later increase its efficiency by introducing automated driving functionality. You will work very closely with our Safety, System Engineering, Controls Engineering, Embedded and Legal teams to iteratively deliver to Vay’s Autonomy stack.

Requirements

Responsibilities:

• Define and execute Vay’s Autonomy roadmap supported by teledriving

• Grow a stellar team which would be able to deliver on the Autonomy roadmap

• Guide the team in making technical decisions which have an impact across the stack (e.g. sensor and compute selection)

• Define the engineering standards for the Autonomy team (e.g. engineering design and code review processes)

• Be a mediator and drive discussions between Autonomy and other teams (Safety, Legal, System Engineering) which have impact on the roadmap

• Help define Vay as a go-to-company for talent looking for autonomous driving challenges in Europe

• Build strong engineering leadership within the team in order to enable organizational scaling

The Profile:

• 10+ years of hands-on experience developing and shipping complex software products and at least 3 years in leading team(s).

• You have put autonomous driving features on public roads.

• Prior experience in inspiring and leading large engineering organizations (20+ people) and helped them to scale even further

Our values:

• We are drivers: At Vay, everyone is a driver. You are taking ownership of the situation or challenge. You get behind the steering wheel. You are committed to take initiative and drive it to completion
• We’re pioneers: We do work that has never been done before. This comes with challenges, frustrations, and failures along the way. We embrace them, we persevere and we invent, simplify, and are creative to overcome them
• We’re stronger as a team: We only can succeed as a team. We are in this together and strongly believe that as a team we are much greater than the sum of our parts. We enjoy our diversity, encourage different opinions, and respect each other as we come together to build, improve and grow
• We build trust: We build trust through consistently doing the right thing and following through on our commitments towards customers, cities, and stakeholders

Additional benefits:

• You’ll be joining a highly committed, experienced, fun, and international team from over 25 countries. The team has previously worked at companies such as Tesla, Google, Waymo, Zoox, Byton, Argo, Amazon, Uber as well as Audi, BMW, and Daimler and has founded various companies before
• You would be a part of fixing transportation in metropolitan areas all over the world – from Europe
• We have a generous, highly employee-friendly stock option plan and pay above industry standards
• We organize thoughtful & fun team events throughout the year
• We support highly flexible working policies where possible as well as support for your relocation – it doesn’t matter where you currently live
• We contribute to a FitX or UrbanSportsClub membership, plus free and all-day use of our Gravity Gym in the Berlin office
• We contribute to your monthly public transport ticket in Berlin so that it costs you <50% of the regular price
• We provide healthy snacks, drinks, and coffee at our waterfront office in Berlin

We strongly encourage candidates of all different backgrounds and identities to apply. Each new hire is an opportunity for us to bring in a different perspective, and we are always eager to further diversify our company.

Vay is committed to building an inclusive, supportive place for you to do the best and most rewarding work of your career.

Come join the future! :)