Vehicle Operations Manager

Vehicle Operations Manager

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Autonomous Delivery · Full-time · On-site · Reports to the Head of Service Operations

We operate an autonomous delivery fleet in Abu Dhabi. This role owns the team that keeps every vehicle moving — and owns how many vehicles one person can keep moving.

The team you will run

The team runs two modes from one interchangeable pool:

• Fleet Response Operators — monitor vehicles from a remote cockpit and take over when a vehicle cannot proceed on its own. They are in the cockpit, not in the vehicle.
• Safety Officers — drive a safety car for on-road support: recovery when remote takeover fails, mapping escort, and incidents.

Same people, cross-trained, one roster. How they split each day is your call.

The mandate

You are taking this team from several dozen to around 85 people. Two numbers define the job:

• The safety and quality floor on every shift — this never moves.
• The vehicles-per-operator ratio — this has to keep climbing. Today one operator handles up to 12 vehicles and nobody can say why that number isn't higher. Finding out is your first job.

What you'll own

• Vehicles-per-operator ratio, attendance and working-hour utilisation across a combined two-mode roster.
• Hiring bar, onboarding pace and attrition as the team scales to ~85 — operator supply must never cap fleet growth.
• Training, certification and layered quality assurance — plus the team leads you promote from within to run shift-level supervision.
• The escalation ladder for exceptions, and safety-car allocation when support, escort and recovery compete for the same cars.

What you'll need

• 3–5 years in AV remote operations, teleoperation, cloud control, or safety operator team operations, including 2+ years managing people.
• Hands-on or management experience with an AV safety operator team — cockpit or on-road, either qualifies. This is a hard requirement. You can judge whether a takeover was handled well.
• Full-cycle ownership of a frontline team of 30+ — recruitment, rostering, performance (100+ preferred) — where you built the training and QA system from scratch and made the standard hold across shifts.
• A valid driving licence — you drive the safety car yourself to check frontline work on the road. You also pull your own data (SQL or BI preferred) and use AI tools rather than waiting on someone else.
• Strong English as a working language — you interview, train and resolve conflict directly with an Indian, Pakistani, Filipino and Ugandan frontline.
• Based in Abu Dhabi, or ready to relocate. This is a permanently on-site role in Abu Dhabi, not a travel-based one.

Being straight about the job

The team is expanding fast, hiring and training pressure is concentrated, and the rostering and efficiency tooling is incomplete — parts of this job run manually before they run on a system. If building the system while running the operation is the part you enjoy, this role will suit you.

What we offer

• A competitive package benchmarked to the UAE market.
• Visa sponsored.
• AI tool subscriptions provided.
• Day shift, non-rotating, with team leads covering early and late shifts.
• Ownership of the frontline of driverless delivery in the Middle East — 85 people across remote cockpit and on-road support, with the vehicles-per-operator ratio sitting with this one role, not a shift slice of someone else's operation.