Senior Manager, AV Deployment Readiness

Who we are

Gatik, the leader in autonomous middle-mile logistics, is revolutionizing the B2B supply chain with its autonomous transportation-as-a-service (ATaaS) solution and prioritizing safe, consistent deliveries while streamlining freight movement by reducing congestion. The company focuses on short-haul, B2B logistics for Fortune 500 retailers and in 2021 launched the world’s first fully driverless commercial transportation service with Walmart. Gatik's Class 3-7 autonomous trucks are commercially deployed across major markets, including Texas, Arkansas, and Ontario, Canada, driving innovation in freight transportation.

The company's proprietary Level 4 autonomous technology, Gatik Carrier™, is custom-built to transport freight safely and efficiently between pick-up and drop-off locations on the middle mile. With robust capabilities in both highway and urban environments, Gatik Carrier™ serves as an all-encompassing solution that integrates advanced software and hardware powering the fleet, facilitating effortless integration into customers' logistics operations.

About the role

The Senior Manager, AV Deployment Readiness owns end-to-end orchestration of every deployment from planning through go-live — ensuring that production, validations, deployment and all supporting infrastructure, staffing and customer commitments converge on time. You are the single-threaded owner of deployment delivery.

This role is onsite 5 days a week at our Mountain View, CA office!

What you'll do

• Deployment Tracking & Orchestration

• Own the master deployment readiness view across all customers, locations, and deployment phases — from vehicle allocation through operational go-live.

• Manage a multi-tier tracking system (Jira or equivalent) spanning deployment-level milestones and vehicle- level parallel workstreams: vehicle release from production, remote supervision station setup, route/map validation, and staff training completion among others.

• Build dashboards providing real-time visibility into vehicle-by-vehicle, customer-by-customer readiness, deployment-level status, and cross-cutting blockers. Define and enforce gate-based readiness criteria
ensuring no deployment advances without prerequisites clearing.

• Track supply vs. demand metrics — vehicle release timing against customer dates, crew-to-vehicle ratios,
and rolling readiness scores — to surface risks long before they become blockers.

• Escalation & Risk Management

• Operate as the central escalation point for deployment blockers. Maintain escalation protocols with defined SLAs based on deployment proximity and severity.

• Maintain a risk-weighted priority matrix accounting for customer contractual commitments, revenue impact, fleet availability, and operational complexity.

• Run regular deployment readiness reviews with engineering, safety, and operations leadership — crisp status updates with clear asks and owners for every open item.

• Cross-Functional Liaison

• Serve as the connective tissue between Hardware/Software Engineering (vehicle production, software feature readiness), Safety (safety case gating, operational design domain validation), and Operations (field
staff, remote supervision/training, site infrastructure, customer interface).

• Translate engineering and safety constraints into operational timelines and vice versa. Coordinate with customer-facing teams to set expectations and provide early warning when timelines are at risk.

• Tooling & Continuous Improvement

• Own the project structure for deployment tracking: issue hierarchies, automation rules, custom workflows, and reporting dashboards. Develop runbooks, checklists, and SOPs for each deployment phase.

• Conduct post-deployment retrospectives and feed improvements back into readiness processes, tooling, and coordination cadences

What we're looking for

• 7+ years in program management, deployment operations, or launch readiness in autonomous vehicles, robotics, aerospace, defense, automotive, or similarly complex hardware + software domains.

• Demonstrated experience managing multi-workstream programs where hardware, software, field infrastructure, regulatory approvals, and customer commitments must converge simultaneously.

• Deep proficiency with Jira or equivalent for complex project tracking: hierarchies, custom fields, automation, dashboards. You architect workflows, not just use them.

• Track record managing programs with hard external deadlines where missing the date has real financial and relationship consequences.

• Experience building deployment readiness frameworks from scratch in fast-moving environment

Bonus Qualifications

• Direct experience in AV operations, fleet deployment, or connected vehicle programs. Familiarity with safety case frameworks (UL 4600, ISO 26262, SOTIF) is a strong differentiator.

• Background in organizations transitioning from human-operated to autonomous systems, particularly where operational mitigations are removed through phased gates.

• Experience with supply/demand forecasting for fleet operations: vehicle availability modeling, crew scheduling, capacity planning

Salary Ranges - $180,000- $250,000

More about Gatik

Founded in 2017 by experts in autonomous vehicle technology, Gatik has rapidly expanded its presence to Mountain View, Dallas-Fort Worth, Arkansas, and Toronto. As the first and only company to achieve fully driverless middle-mile commercial deliveries, Gatik holds a unique and defensible position in the AV industry, with a clear trajectory toward sustainable growth and profitability.

We have delivered complete, proprietary AV technology - an integration of software and hardware - to enable earlier successes for our clients in constrained Level 4 autonomy. By choosing the middle mile – with defined point-to-point delivery, we have simplified some of the more complex AV challenges, enabling us to achieve full autonomy ahead of competitors. Given extensive knowledge of Gatik’s well-defined, fixed route ODDs and hybrid architecture, we are able to hyper-optimize our models with exponentially less data, establish gate-keeping mechanisms to maintain explainability, and ensure continued safety of the system for unmanned operations.

Visit us at Gatik for more company information and Careers at Gatik for more open roles.

Notable News

• Bloomberg: Autonomous Trucking Firm Gatik Inks Contracts Worth $600 Million

• Forbes: Hundreds’ Of Gatik Robot Delivery Trucks Headed For U.S. Roads

• Forbes:Gatik And Loblaw Announce Largest Commercial Deployment Of AV Trucks

• Forbes: Forget robotaxis. Upstart Gatik sees middle-mile deliveries as the path to profitable AVs

• Tech Brew: Gatik AI exec unpacks the regulations that could shape the AV industry

• Business Wire: Gatik Paves the Way for Safe Driverless Operations (‘Freight-Only’) at Scale with Industry-First Third-Party Safety Assessment Framework

• Auto Futures: Autonomous Trucking Group Gatik Secures Investment From NIPPON EXPRESS HOLDINGS

• Automotive News: Gatik foresees hundreds of self-driving trucks on road soon, and that's just the beginning

• Forbes: Isuzu And Gatik Go All In To Scale Up Driverless Freight Services

• Bloomberg: Autonomous Vehicle Startup Takes Off by Picking Off Easier Routes

• Reuters: Driverless vehicles on limited routes bump along despite US robotaxi scrutiny

Taking care of our team

At Gatik, we connect people of extraordinary talent and experience to an opportunity to create a more resilient supply chain and contribute to our environment’s sustainability. We are diverse in our backgrounds and perspectives yet united by a bold vision and shared commitment to our values. Our culture emphasizes the importance of collaboration, respect and agility.

We at Gatik strive to create a diverse and inclusive environment where everyone feels they have opportunities to succeed and grow because we know that together we can do great things. We are committed to an inclusive and diverse team. We do not discriminate based on race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, marital status or any legally protected status.