Venture-backed defense tech company building combat-tested unmanned aircraft is hiring a leader to own how autonomy performance is measured across every platform — drones operating in GPS- and comms-denied environments. This role defines the metrics and acceptance criteria that clear autonomy software to fly and builds the team and systems that produce that evidence: the multi-tier regression and simulation infrastructure (unit → open-loop replay → closed-loop sim → HIL on production flight computers), the end-to-end autonomy data platform (on-vehicle capture through versioned datasets for model training), the hardware-in-the-loop bench, and field test operations. Owns release gating, publishes coverage and reliability reporting to leadership, and hires and leads engineers across software infrastructure, data engineering, simulation, and physical test.