Offshore Vision-AI Autonomy Leader

The mandate

The autonomy executive left after a turbine-inspection robot continued through a sea-spray occlusion that its vision stack classified as clear approach space, crossing a recovery boundary before a vessel operator intervened. No injury or asset strike occurred, but the customer stopped autonomous missions, and teams subsequently discovered that perception confidence, marine-state limits and vehicle actions were logged on different clocks with incompatible incident histories.

The interim must assume the Oslo seat within three weeks and remain for fourteen months, spanning a complete North Sea operating season. Recruitment for the permanent leader opens after the first controlled customer array completes sixty accepted missions in month seven; a six-week shared command period will follow appointment, and the temporary mandate will not extend to accommodate unrelated fleet-delivery delays.

Handover is complete when vision uncertainty and out-of-distribution signals constrain the autonomy policy before a recovery envelope is breached, mission evidence is time-synchronised from sensor to operator intervention, and three customer arrays have completed their agreed supervised-to-autonomous progression without an open critical hazard. The successor must command an offshore degraded-visibility exercise, defend the residual hazard file and authorise the next autonomy release independently.

The interim may ground any robot class, narrow weather or proximity envelopes, reject a perception model, revise mission-control escalation, appoint temporary incident specialists and deploy up to NOK120 million from the authorised recovery reserve. Board approval is required to restore the halted customer’s unsupervised service, widen accepted residual risk, exceed that reserve or make external safety representations; permanent executive appointments, claims settlement and vessel-command authority are withheld.

Airframe redesign, blade-repair methods, turbine-maintenance planning, commercial charter negotiation and expansion beyond the existing North Sea customer set are outside scope. The seat can demand interface evidence from navigation, hardware and marine operations, but does not own new sensor procurement, general fleet productivity or product features unrelated to perception-conditioned autonomous action.

Why this seat is open

The near-miss demonstrated that strong object-detection scores had been treated as proof of safe vehicle behaviour under offshore degradation. Machine-perception, robotics and marine leaders each defended their own component boundary, leaving no executive owner for the action-level assurance case. Temporary independent authority is needed to restore customer operations while the board searches for a leader who can hold technical and marine risk together.

What you will own

• Reconstruct the stopped mission across raw sensors, perception outputs, state estimates, autonomy commands, marine conditions and operator actions on one verified timeline.
• Define operational envelopes for visibility, spray, lighting, sea state, turbine proximity, communications and recovery energy with explicit fail-safe transitions.
• Decide which robot, model and mission combinations may return to supervised trials, requiring witnessed evidence before each increase in autonomous authority.
• Rebuild perception evaluation around occlusion, glare, salt contamination, moving cables, repetitive structures and unfamiliar vessels rather than clean-frame averages.
• Integrate model uncertainty and out-of-distribution detection into action policy so degraded sensing changes speed, stand-off distance, abort and human-control behaviour.
• Establish fleet surveillance that joins false negatives, interventions, aborted missions, environmental exposure and maintenance state without suppressing commercially inconvenient denominators.
• Induct the successor through an offshore exercise, a customer restoration decision and a release review, transferring unresolved hazards and decision rights explicitly.

Candidate qualifications

• Held executive responsibility for perception-led autonomy in offshore, maritime, aerial or comparable safety-constrained robotics operating beyond laboratory conditions.
• Personally grounded or restricted an autonomous fleet after an adverse signal and can evidence the investigation, containment and staged service restoration.
• Validated computer vision under weather, occlusion, contamination, lighting and domain-shift conditions that changed safe vehicle behaviour.
• Connected probabilistic perception outputs to operational envelopes, recovery logic and human intervention rather than treating model accuracy as the safety case.
• Led cross-disciplinary incident command spanning machine learning, controls, hardware, remote operators, marine specialists and a demanding asset owner.
• Completed a live-season recovery and transferred release authority, hazard evidence and customer commitments to a permanent technical leader.

Non-negotiables

• Available within three weeks for an exclusive Oslo-based role, with twice-monthly Stavanger presence and fitness and willingness for approved offshore observation.
• Will ground equipment or narrow an operating envelope whenever action-level safety evidence is insufficient, regardless of vessel charter or customer availability.
• Has governed autonomous hardware in hazardous field conditions; surveillance-video analytics or simulation-only leadership does not meet the requirement.
• Must disclose any interest in the robot manufacturer, sensor supplier, marine contractor or assurance organisation involved in the recovery.

1. 49 words maximum. State your notice position, earliest Oslo start and ability to meet Stavanger and offshore attendance throughout fourteen months.
2. 49 words maximum. Describe an autonomy mission you stopped after a perception signal, including the operational boundary breached and evidence required to resume.
3. 49 words maximum. How have you converted vision uncertainty under environmental degradation into a specific vehicle or operator response?