About the position
We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to contribute to the development of our Trajectory Selection system, a critical component of our motion planning stack. In this role, you will work at the intersection of robotics, real-time systems, and decision-making algorithms to ensure safe, smooth, and intelligent navigation of autonomous systems in dynamic environments. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams including Planning, Perception, Controls, and Simulation to design and implement high-performance software that balances safety, comfort, and efficiency. We are looking for strong software engineers with motion planning experience to help in developing and deploying motion planning components for next generation self-driving systems. This requires strong ownership over critical components. Candidates need to understand, experiment, improve, and field state-of-the-art motion planning algorithms and systems in real-time, safety-critical applications. We are focused on building a product. Candidates should have a mission-driven mindset and customer-centric obsession to deliver a compelling product, and be able to work with significant cross-functional interactions.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement the trajectory selection module for real-time motion planning.
- Develop algorithms to evaluate and score candidate trajectories based on safety, kinematics, comfort, and goal achievement.
- Integrate cost models, constraints, and prediction outputs from upstream systems (e.g., perception, forecasting).
- Optimize system performance for runtime efficiency and determinism in safety-critical applications.
- Collaborate with other domain experts (e.g., ML, prediction, controls) to ensure seamless system integration.
- Write clean, well-documented, and tested code in C++ and Python.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or related field.
- 5+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 3+ in robotics, motion planning, or autonomous systems.
- Proficiency in C++ (C++14/17), with solid software design and debugging skills.
- Deep understanding of trajectory generation and evaluation in dynamic environments.
- Experience with numerical optimization, search/planning algorithms (e.g., A*, RRT), or control theory.
- Strong understanding of kinematic/dynamic models and constraints in vehicle or robotic systems.
Nice-to-haves
- Experience with ML models is a plus.
