Embedded Engineering Manager - Robotics & Drones

About this role

Embedded Engineering Manager - Robotics & Drones We are Aptiv - a global technology company with 200,000 specialists in 48 countries. We develop innovative software and build the hardware to bring autonomous driving cars, advanced driver-assistance systems, connected vehicles and smart cities to life in a way that only we can. We work in partnership with almost all car manufacturers. Our sensors, systems and software can already be found in almost all passenger cars today.

Aptiv is building a new Robotics business focused on Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) and Drones for warehouse, industrial, and adjacent markets. A core differentiator of these systems is robust, reliable, and scalable perception across diverse environments and customer use cases.

We are seeking an Embedded Engineering Manager to lead teams responsible for the development of robotics and drone hardware and software systems. In this role, you will define and execute technology and product roadmaps spanning embedded systems, software platforms, autonomy, and machine learning-based perception, while building and leading high-performing engineering teams.

You will balance strong technical leadership with people management, driving the delivery of reliable, scalable, and production-ready robotics and drone solutions. Working closely with autonomy, localization, safety, hardware, data, and product teams, you will ensure system capabilities meet performance, safety, and commercial objectives. You will also help transform early-stage concepts and proofs of concept into robust, data-driven products that can be deployed across multiple platforms, applications, and customer environments.

Technical Leadership & Strategy • Own and drive the technical strategy, architecture, and execution for embedded systems and software across AMR and drone platforms. • Provide technical leadership across sensing, compute platforms, data pipelines, perception algorithms, embedded software, and system integration. • Collaborate with Product Managers and Technical Program Managers to shape product roadmaps, ensuring technical feasibility, realistic resource planning, and alignment with business objectives. • Develop and maintain technology and competency roadmaps by monitoring industry trends, emerging technologies, and future product requirements. • Serve as a technical thought leader for systems engineering, embedded software, robotics, autonomy, and perception technologies. • Guide key technical trade-offs involving performance, latency, reliability, safety, compute resources, scalability, maintainability, and cost.

Systems, Software & Perception Engineering Leadership • Lead engineering teams responsible for: • Embedded systems architecture and platform software. • Sensor integration and data acquisition (cameras, lidar, radar, depth sensors, IMUs, and related technologies). • Sensor data ingestion, preprocessing, synchronization, and transport. • Runtime inference, diagnostics, monitoring, and health management. • System-level integration across perception, localization, planning, safety, and control subsystems.

• Establish engineering standards, architecture guidelines, and software development best practices that support scalable, production-ready robotics systems. • Drive technical execution from concept through deployment while ensuring reuse across multiple robot and autonomous platform form factors.

Product Delivery & Technical Execution • Resolve critical technical escalations and remove engineering roadblocks by working directly with product teams when necessary. • Support product development teams throughout the development lifecycle, ensuring technical risks are identified and mitigated early. • Drive cross-functional problem solving across hardware, software, autonomy, safety, and product organizations. • Partner with Technical Program Managers and engineering leads to balance priorities, schedules, resources, and technical scope. • Drive continuous process, methodology, and workflow improvements to improve engineering quality, predictability, and efficiency.

Team Leadership & Talent Development • Directly manage and grow multiple systems, software, and perception engineering teams. • Establish clear goals, expectations, priorities, and performance objectives aligned with product and organizational strategies. • Lead hiring, onboarding, performance management, succession planning, and career development activities. • Mentor engineers and technical leaders in: • Systems architecture and embedded software design. • Robotics and autonomous system development. • Scalable software engineering and DevOps practices. • Root-cause analysis, problem solving, and technical decision making.

• Foster a culture of ownership, quality, innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning. • Identify future staffing, skillset, and resource needs based on product roadmaps and organizational growth plans.

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Platform Integration • Partner closely with hardware, SoC, and platform engineering teams to: • Evaluate and select sensors, compute platforms, and acceleration technologies. • Define system architectures that balance performance, power consumption, cost, and scalability. • Ensure robust timing, synchronization, communication, and bandwidth management.

• Collaborate with autonomy, localization, planning, controls, and safety teams to establish system interfaces, requirements, data contracts, diagnostics, and performance expectations. • Support build-versus-buy evaluations for sensors, software frameworks, perception technologies, SDKs, and third-party components. • Work closely with Product Managers, Technical Program Managers, and customers to translate business and operational requirements into technical solutions.

Quality, Reliability & Safety • Define and track system and perception performance KPIs including reliability, latency, availability, robustness, scalability, confidence calibration, and operation

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