Engineer
US$275,000 – US$350,000 / yr base salary
Posted 2 Jun 2026
Advertised as “Principal Engineer, Hardware”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Management level
- Individual contributor
- Employment
- On-Site
- Contract
- Full-time
| Base salary | US$275,000 – US$350,000 / yr |
|---|
Who We Are
AeroVect is transforming ground handling with autonomy, redefining how airlines and ground service providers around the globe run day-to-day operations. We are a Series A company backed by top-tier venture capital investors in aviation and autonomous driving. Our customers include some of the world’s largest airlines and ground handling providers. For more information, visit www.aerovect.com.
We are hiring a Principal Engineer for Hardware to take technical ownership of the AeroVect vehicle platform — the integrated mechanical, electrical, and electromechanical systems that turn an off-the-shelf airport tractor into an autonomous vehicle. This is the role for an engineer who has built real physical products at production volume and who can carry a system from a clean-sheet architecture through DFM, supplier qualification, validation, and field reliability.
This is an individual contributor role at the most senior level. You will set hardware technical direction, do the hands-on design work yourself, lead the hardest cross-discipline decisions, and raise the bar across the hardware organization. You will partner closely with the VP of Engineering and most of the engineering teams, Hardware, Software, Systems, and Safety.
You Will
Vehicle architecture across mechanical and electrical disciplines
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Setting the architectural direction for our retrofit kit and integrated vehicle platforms across generations, trading off cost, reliability, manufacturability, and safety.
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Owning the integration points where mechanical, electrical, and electromechanical subsystems meet — sensor mounts, compute enclosures, wiring harnesses, actuation mechanisms, power distribution — and making sure those interfaces hold up in the field.
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Driving design-for-manufacturing rigor into the hardware platform so that our fleet can be produced at volume without continuous engineering involvement on the production line.
Drive-by-wire and safety-critical electromechanical systems
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Partnering with the software teams on the next generation of our drive-by-wire stack, covering steering, braking, throttle, and the vehicle interface.
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Defining the redundancy architecture for each drive-by-wire subsystem — what requires full dual-redundancy, what can rely on degraded-mode fallback, and what the safe state is for each failure scenario.
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Leading the technical work to move toward a certified drive-by-wire solution that meets functional-safety standards (ISO 26262 / ISO 13849) and unlocks driverless operation at scale, including vendor selection and qualification.