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Vehicle Technician, Autonomous Vehicles

Charlottesville, Virginia

On-site, Charlottesville, VA | Full time | Periodic travel to customer sites


About the Role

You will be a vehicle technician on our federal autonomous vehicle programs, responsible for getting our retrofitted vehicles ready, keeping them calibrated and running, and fixing them in the field when something breaks. You will work alongside our operators, mappers and engineers on vehicles that carry people and cargo on real roads.

This is not a shop-only role. Within your first weeks you will help prepare a vehicle for transport to a live U.S. Army installation, support acceptance testing before it ships, and travel on site to keep it operating through route mapping and testing.

No prior experience with our platform is expected. We will teach you TONY and MAX. We are hiring for hands-on hardware and electrical skills and the temperament to do good work in the field.

What You'll Do

  • Vehicle preparation

    • Prepare retrofitted vehicles for deployment: inspection, sensor and compute checks, wiring and connector verification, and readiness for transport

    • Install, secure and verify sensor, compute and power hardware following our build documentation

    • Keep vehicle records current so anyone on the team can see what was done, when, and why

  • Sensor calibration and acceptance testing

    • Perform sensor calibration for lidar, radar, camera, GNSS and IMU, and verify results before a vehicle goes into service

    • Execute acceptance test procedures, record results, and flag anything that does not meet the standard

    • Support repeat calibration after transport, hardware changes or field repairs

  • Field repair and support

    • Deploy to customer sites, including a federal installation in the Southeast, to diagnose and repair hardware, wiring and electrical issues on site

    • Troubleshoot under real constraints: limited parts, limited tools, and a schedule that does not move

    • Coordinate with engineering in Charlottesville to resolve issues quickly and document the fix

  • Application test support

    • Support testing of the fleet management and operations software on the vehicle, working with our developers and operators

    • Capture clear, reproducible reports of what happened in the field so engineering can act on them

What we are looking for

  • Hands-on automotive or robotics hardware experience. Automotive technician, fleet maintenance, robotics field service, military vehicle maintenance, or similar

  • Solid electrical skills. You are comfortable with 12/24V vehicle electrical systems, reading wiring diagrams, using a multimeter, and building and repairing harnesses

  • Field service temperament. Calm, resourceful and self-directed when you are the person on site and the vehicle has to run tomorrow

  • Careful and methodical. You follow procedures, you record what you did, and you do not skip steps under pressure

  • Comfortable working with tools, cabling and physical hardware in shop and outdoor conditions

  • Valid driver's license and a clean driving record

  • Willingness to travel, including multi-week deployments on short notice

  • Ability to pass federal installation access vetting before first travel

  • U.S. citizenship, required for the federal installation access this role depends on

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience with ADAS, drive-by-wire, or autonomous vehicle hardware

  • Sensor calibration experience (lidar, radar, camera, GNSS/IMU)

  • CAN bus diagnostics or vehicle network tools

  • Experience working on a military installation or with a government customer

  • ASE certification or equivalent technical training

How We Work

We use AI tools aggressively, and we expect you to. We treat Claude and similar tools as force multipliers for requirements drafting, safety analysis, document production, code review and research. A small team competing against companies a hundred times our size does it by working smarter, and we are explicit about that. Candidates who are fluent with these tools — and thoughtful about where they help and where they must not be trusted — will do well here.

This is a physical job on real vehicles. You will be based in Charlottesville and work on site, in the shop and in the field. When you are deployed, you are fully present.

You will be trained, deliberately. You will learn our TONY retrofit kit and MAX platform from the people who built them, working alongside our senior technician and engineers. If you want to move from general vehicle work into fielded autonomous systems, this is an unusual opportunity.

Why this role is worth your time

Most autonomy engineers work on a fragment of a system inside a large organization, on a program that may never leave the lab. Here you will own the technical definition of deployments that carry real people on real roads, defend them in front of government approval authorities, and see them operate. Your work will directly determine whether a 22-year-old American company wins against competitors with billions in venture funding.

It is demanding, the timelines are real, and the stakes are visible. That is the job.


To Apply

Submit your résumé and a brief introduction to jobs@perronerobotics.com.