Technical Lead Manager - Perception, Self-Driving Systems

Responsibilities

• Own the perception model end-to-end: architecture, training, evaluation, and deployment across geographies, road types, sensor setups, and environmental conditions.
• Drive a camera-first perception strategy to reduce dependencies on HD maps and lidar.
• Lead training and iteration cycles hands-on, including data analysis, eval dashboards, and failure analysis.
• Own model performance across full deployment surface: highway, urban, residential, ramps, complex intersections, poor weather, hilly terrain.
• Manage model lifecycle from training through quantization and deployment on embedded compute with device-specific optimizations.
• Work directly with OEM customer programs to understand sensor configurations, target ODDs, and performance requirements.
• Recruit, develop, and technically lead a team of perception engineers.

Requirements

• 5+ years in ML/deep learning for perception or 3D scene understanding with hands-on experience training and deploying vision models at scale.
• 2+ years managing or technically leading a perception team.
• Experience building production perception systems, especially camera-only or camera-first solutions.
• Track record deploying perception models to embedded hardware under real-time latency and compute constraints.
• Strong software engineering in Python and C++ across the stack from training to onboard inference.
• Experience scaling perception models across multiple geographies, sensor setups, or vehicle platforms.

Nice to Haves

• Deep familiarity with transformer-based architectures for 3D perception, BEV representations, multi-task learning, and dense prediction.
• Familiarity with occupancy-based scene representations, sparse query-based architectures, or temporal aggregation approaches.
• Experience reducing or removing map dependencies in perception systems.
• Background in autolabel pipelines, data quality monitoring, or data flywheel design for perception.
• Experience with closed-loop simulation for perception model evaluation.
• Experience at an AV company that has shipped perception to production.

Compensation

Base salary range: $231,900 - $298,100 USD annually, plus equity and benefits.