Senior Software Engineer - Planning
Designs and ships deterministic, safety-critical motion planning systems for autonomous vehicles, including fallback and minimal-risk maneuvers. Requires 5+ years in motion planning for autonomous vehicles or robotics, strong planning algorithm expertise, and C++ experience in real-time systems.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Design and implement classical or ML motion planners for fallback and minimal-risk maneuvers.
- Build planners that operate reliably under degraded perception, partial observability, and system faults.
- Define and execute safe, deterministic vehicle motions such as controlled slow-downs, pull-overs, and safe stops.
- Use large-scale simulation and real-world data to evaluate planner behavior and guide parameter tuning.
- Develop metrics, analysis tools, and dashboards to understand planner performance at scale.
- Collaborate with behavior prediction, perception, controls, safety, and remote assistance teams.
- Contribute to a reusable fallback platform used across trucking and other autonomy programs.
Requirements
- 5+ years of experience in motion planning for autonomous vehicles or robotics.
- Strong foundation in robotic motion planning algorithms and trajectory generation, including optimization-, search-, or rule-based methods.
- Experience building deterministic, safety-critical planning systems.
- A data-driven mindset for large-scale evaluation, debugging, and tuning of planning behavior.
- Proficiency in C++ and experience working in real-time systems.
- Strong systems thinking and cross-functional collaboration skills.
Nice to Have
- Experience designing minimal-risk maneuvers (MRM) or emergency handling behaviors.
- Familiarity with autonomous-vehicle safety concepts, ODD constraints, or safety-case-driven development.
- Experience using ML techniques for parameter tuning, calibration, or offline optimization.
- Experience working with degraded sensors, uncertainty, or human-in-the-loop systems.
- Background in simulation frameworks or large-scale log analysis.
Skills
C++, Motion Planning, Trajectory Generation, Robotics, Real-Time Systems, Autonomous Vehicles, Machine Learning, Simulation, Data Analysis, Optimization, Search Algorithms, Rule-Based Systems, Dashboard Development, Safety-Critical Systems, Log Analysis
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