Senior Engineering Manager, Robotics Software

HADRIAN - MANUFACTURING THE FUTURE Hadrian is building autonomous factories to reindustrialize America. By combining AI, advanced software, robotics, and full-stack manufacturing, we help aerospace and defense companies build rockets, satellites, aircraft, ships, and other mission-critical systems up to 10x faster and at significantly lower cost. Following our $1.37B Series D at a $7.87B valuation, Hadrian is rapidly expanding our manufacturing footprint, launching new capabilities across welding, casting, forging, electronics, additive manufacturing, and more, while scaling our Factory-as-a-Service platform to transform how critical products are built. Backed by leading investors including JPMorgan Chase, Valor Equity Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, 137 Ventures, Lux Capital, T. Rowe Price, and Morgan Stanley, we’re building the future of American manufacturing—and looking for exceptional people to help make it happen. If you’re ready to take on the most challenging and rewarding work of your career while helping create American manufacturing jobs for generations to come, you’re exactly who we’re looking for. The Role The Autonomous Factory Systems team builds the software that gives Hadrian's factories the ability to sense, decide, and act autonomously. This includes the core robotics stack — perception, behaviors, planning, collision avoidance, and high-level control — alongside orchestration between robots and manufacturing machines and the hardware abstraction layer that connects our software to the machines on the floor. You will build and manage a team of engineers focused on the robotics side of this stack. This is a people-first management role: your focus is on hiring, growing, and supporting a strong team, while staying close enough to the technical work to help guide direction and staffing decisions. What You’ll Do - Own the people leadership of your engineers: hiring, onboarding, mentorship, career growth, and performance. - Build a hiring engine for robotics talent — define the bar, run a strong interview process, and help recruit a top-tier team across perception, planning, behaviors, and control. - Ensure engineers are engaged, growing, and set up to do their best work; regularly assess team health and address issues before they become problems. - Have real input into technical direction and where we invest headcount, in close partnership with the engineers and technical leads who drive architecture and design. - Partner with Hardware, Controls, Product, and Operations to translate business priorities into a sequenced roadmap, and make sure the team is resourced and organized to deliver it. - Continuously improve the team's engineering practices and developer lifecycle: planning, design review, code review, testing, simulation, deployment, on-call, and incident response. What We’re Looking For - 5+ years of engineering management experience leading robotics, autonomy, or other complex technical teams in production. - A genuine passion for people management — you care about your engineers' growth and happiness as much as you care about what the team ships. - A track record of hiring and building strong technical teams, including for hard-to-fill or specialized roles. - Technical fluency in robotics concepts (perception, planning, behaviors, control, collision avoidance) to have informed conversations about tradeoffs, evaluate technical leads' proposals, and contribute a useful point of view on direction and prioritization — without needing to be the architect yourself. - Strong judgment on organizational design: how to structure a team, allocate headcount across projects, and balance depth vs. breadth as the stack grows. - Excellent communication and cross-functional partnership skills — you can align engineers, technical leads, hardware/controls partners, and leadership. - A track record of running a healthy team: clear expectations, direct feedback, and a strong sense of ownership among your eng…