Principal Engineer - AV Simulation and Evaluation

Description

The company is building core platform systems to speed up physical AI work, including autonomous driving and robotics. The role suits an engineer who works across data architecture, distributed systems and autonomous vehicle development, spanning cloud, local and on-road settings.

You will own deep technical areas from start to finish, such as simulation infrastructure for AV and robotics and performance evaluation for autonomous vehicles.

Responsibilities

• Build simulation and evaluation infrastructure that AV and ML engineers use to advance Level 4 self-driving.
• Develop efficient data formats for AV evaluation that balance performance, interoperability and correctness, across formats such as Protobuf, Arrow, Parquet and MCAP.
• Work with AI and robotics teams to understand their simulation and evaluation needs in depth.
• Build reliable services, APIs, data pipelines and AV simulation and evaluation workflows and frameworks that run at a scale of hundreds of millions of runs per day.
• Improve performance throughout the stack through profiling, parallelization, memory efficiency, query optimization and protocol redesign.
• Build diagnostic and observability tools so teams can understand and debug their data and test pipelines.
• Champion the adoption of new standards and technologies across the physical AI tooling ecosystem.

Requirements

• A BS or MS in computer science, or equivalent experience.
• 15+ years of professional software engineering experience focused on distributed systems and data-intensive applications.
• Proficiency in Go, Python or Java, and experience working across the full backend stack.
• Hands-on experience building high-performance, low-latency data systems, including binary serialization, efficient encoding and columnar formats.
• A solid grasp of distributed systems, including concurrency, consistency trade-offs, latency optimization and compute-efficient design.
• A track record of finding and fixing performance bottlenecks across the stack, including redesigning protocols and data models.
• Experience designing and implementing workflows across distributed systems.
• A record of building foundational systems that several teams depend on, with high reliability and scale.
• Strong communication skills, able to explain complex system design to technical and non-technical partners and speak to users in their terms.
• Experience leading cross-functional projects and getting results across organizational boundaries, including without formal authority.

Conditions

Applications are accepted at least until November 6, 2026.

This posting is for an existing vacancy.

The company uses AI tools in its recruiting process.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of any protected characteristic.

Benefits

• Base salary is set by location, experience and other objective job-related factors, within a range of 272,000 USD to 431,250 USD.
• The company offers competitive pay and a comprehensive benefits package, with details available on its benefits site.