Founding Technical Lead – Autonomous Systems for Rural Emergency Healthcare in Katowice

Location: Remote within the United States, with periodic work in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

Potential future role: Full-time technical leadership, contingent upon project selection and funding.

The opportunity:

Priority Patient Transport is assembling a team to pursue an ambitious National Science Foundation X-Labs mission: making lifesaving emergency capabilities available to rural patients before a conventional ambulance can arrive. Our vision is an autonomous physical-AI platform that can select, configure, and deliver intelligent medical payloads to patients in rural and underserved areas.

We are seeking an entrepreneurial technical leader who can help transform this mission into a technically credible research and development program—and potentially lead that program through prototype development, real-world validation, and national expansion.

Why Priority Patient Transport:

• Priority Patient Transport brings approximately 20 years of experience providing Critical Care, Advanced Life Support, and Basic Life Support ambulance services throughout Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.
• Our teams understand rural emergency healthcare as an operational reality, not an abstract research problem.
• We have transported and cared for patients across long distances, difficult terrain, isolated communities, and severe weather conditions.

Priority can contribute resources rarely available to an early-stage autonomous-systems program:

• Approximately two decades of rural ambulance and medical-transport experience.
• Practicing paramedics and EMTs who can help define requirements, failure modes, workflows, and realistic emergency scenarios.
• Historical operational information that may reveal response patterns, travel times, routes, geographic barriers, weather-related constraints, and locations where earlier delivery of emergency capabilities could have the greatest value.
• Knowledge of rural roads, hospitals, communities, communications limitations, and emergency-response conditions throughout the Shenandoah Valley.
• Ambulances, clinical equipment, training resources, and experienced personnel capable of supporting controlled development and evaluation.
• The ability to integrate autonomous-delivery trials alongside conventional ambulance operations under appropriate safety, privacy, regulatory, and clinical controls.

This creates an opportunity to develop the technology through progressively realistic operations rather than relying exclusively on isolated laboratory demonstrations or artificial test environments.

Early autonomous missions could operate in parallel with actual ambulance responses without replacing, delaying, or interfering with conventional care.

The technical mission:

The project is broader than delivering a conventional medical kit by drone. We envision a vehicle-independent autonomous platform capable of determining what emergency capability is needed, selecting or configuring the appropriate payload, choosing the appropriate delivery system, reaching the patient, and coordinating with patients, bystanders, clinicians, dispatch centers, and responding EMS crews.

Potential research and development areas include:

• Autonomous selection and configuration of medical payloads based on incident information.
• Vehicle-independent autonomy for aerial and ground delivery systems.
• Safe navigation in mountainous, wooded, agricultural, residential, and connectivity-limited environments.
• Last-100-meter localization and delivery.
• Edge AI and continued operation without reliable cloud connectivity or GPS.
• Intelligent medical payloads capable of guiding users and verifying correct application.
• Coordination among autonomous systems, 911 centers, EMS units, hospitals, clinicians, patients, and bystanders.
• Simulation-to-real training using representative rural emergency scenarios.
• Safety-bounded autonomy for high-consequence healthcare applications.
• Modular architecture that allows outside organizations to develop compatible vehicles, payloads, sensors, and emergency-care capabilities.

The initial platform may use an uncrewed aircraft to deliver a modular “Golden Box” containing emergency equipment. The broader mission, however, is to create a new technological foundation for autonomous rural emergency response—not a single drone or delivery product.

What you would do:

During the initial engagement, you would work directly with company leadership and prospective research partners to:

• Define the technical architecture for an autonomous rural emergency-response platform.
• Identify what must be invented beyond existing drone-delivery, telemedicine, and medical-device technologies.
• Design the interaction among autonomous vehicles, medical payloads, dispatch intelligence, communications, patients, bystanders, clinicians, and EMS personnel.
• Translate rural EMS experience and operational data into technical requirements, simulations, experiments, and performance benchmarks.
• Develop a phased prototype, testing, safety, and validation strategy.
• Establish an approach for simulation, controlled testing, shadow deployment, and progressively advanced operational demonstrations.
• Identify critical reliability, cybersecurity, human-factors, regulatory, privacy, and systems-engineering requirements.
• Help recruit universities, robotics researchers, medical-device experts, aviation partners, health systems, and other technical collaborators.
• Contribute substantially to the technical sections of an NSF X-Labs proposal.
• Develop meaningful technical milestones, staffing requirements, facilities, equipment needs, and budgets.
• Present and defend the mission during partner discussions and, if invited, the NSF oral-review process.

If the project advances, this individual could become the full-time technical leader of the proposed X-Lab and direct a multidisciplinary team through prototype development, rural field validation, and expansion into additional regions.

Who we are looking for:

The strongest candidate will combine technical depth with founder-level initiative. You should be comfortable moving from an ambitious mission to a defensible technical architecture, building a team around unanswered questions, and communicating with both researchers and operational EMS professionals.

Relevant backgrounds may include:

• Robotics, autonomous vehicles, uncrewed aircraft systems, or cyber-physical systems.
• Embodied AI, edge AI, distributed autonomy, sensor fusion, planning, or control systems.
• Safety-critical systems engineering.
• Medical robotics, medical devices, digital-health hardware, or prehospital technology.
• Human-robot interaction or human factors.
• Simulation-to-real learning and field robotics.
• Aerospace, defense, disaster response, logistics, or emergency technology.
• Leadership of multidisciplinary R&D programs, startups, research laboratories, or advanced-prototype teams.

Attributes that matter:

• Entrepreneurial and comfortable beginning with an unsolved problem.
• Able to distinguish foundational platform research from ordinary product integration.
• Willing to challenge assumptions while remaining focused on the mission.
• Skilled at converting operational needs into testable engineering requirements.
• Credible with researchers, engineers, clinicians, government reviewers, and commercial partners.
• Comfortable working under milestone-based funding and technical uncertainty.
• Motivated by the opportunity to transform access to emergency care in rural communities.
• Prepared to consider a full-time leadership commitment if the project progresses.

Helpful but not required:

• Advanced degree in a relevant technical discipline.
• Prior experience as a principal investigator, technical director, chief engineer, startup founder, or CTO.
• Experience writing or leading major federal research proposals.
• Experience with NSF, DARPA, ARPA-H, other-transaction agreements, or milestone-based R&D programs.
• Familiarity with regulatory pathways for advanced uncrewed-aircraft operations.
• Experience with regulated medical technology, clinical research, or emergency medicine.
• Experience moving technology from early research through field demonstration.
• Experience recruiting and leading multidisciplinary technical teams.

About the initial engagement:

The immediate work will focus on technical concept development, partnership formation, and preparation of an NSF X-Labs proposal. Selection or funding by NSF is not guaranteed. The person chosen for this role may be proposed as senior/key personnel only after mutual agreement regarding the role, availability, required disclosures, and future commitment. The NSF program generally expects senior/key leadership to be dedicated full-time by the beginning of Phase 1 unless NSF approves otherwise.