Staff / Principal Software Engineer, In-Vehicle AI Experiences

Description

The company's Vehicle AI Experiences team is developing the next generation of smart features for its vehicles, with a focus on what drivers can do in the car and how those features feel to use.

The team is small and moves fast. You would have wide autonomy, stay close to the code, help decide what gets built, and help improve how the wider organization ships software.

This is a product engineering role, not an AI research or agent platform role. The team values broad engineering judgment, fast learning, and a history of finishing complete products over deep expertise in one AI framework.

Staff scope: you would independently own a major capability or product area, lead open-ended cross-functional efforts, set technical patterns, and raise the bar for delivery and quality while still writing code.

Principal scope: you would set technical and product direction across several capabilities, resolve hard architecture and organizational questions, influence strategy across teams, and make Staff and senior engineers more effective. You would stay hands-on, mainly on high-risk, architecture-defining, and cross-cutting work.

Responsibilities

• Take vague customer problems from idea to a production-ready driver feature.
• Build driver-facing capabilities from first concept through release.
• Own features end to end: the driver's request, conversational behavior, on-device fulfillment, vehicle integration, UI, validation, and later iteration.
• Write production Kotlin and contribute to adjacent areas such as Python agent definitions, NLU, LLM orchestration, APIs, and connected services.
• Prototype quickly, test ideas in realistic vehicle settings, and turn the ones that work into reliable products.
• Work with product, UX, conversation design, vehicle software, systems, platform, safety, privacy, and validation teams.
• Balance customer value, speed, reliability, latency, offline behavior, resource limits, maintainability, and driver distraction.
• Find root causes of complex problems that span the app, the assistant, the vehicle, and the cloud.
• Use AI-assisted tools for design, implementation, testing, debugging, and learning unfamiliar code, without lowering the quality bar.
• Create reusable engineering patterns and lightweight workflows that speed up delivery.
• Coach engineers through implementation, design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on technical work together.
• Help shape the in-vehicle AI roadmap and spot opportunities that new technology makes possible.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Significant production experience: at least 8 years for Staff, at least 10 years for Principal.
• Strong hands-on skills in Kotlin, Java, C++, Python, or a comparable language, and the ability and interest to work mainly in Kotlin and Android.
• A track record of independently shipping complex, user-facing features that span several components or systems.
• Ability to turn unclear customer or business goals into concrete designs, phased plans, and working software.
• Solid judgment in system design, debugging, testing, and operational quality.
• Experience leading technical work across teams or functions.
• Clear communication with engineers, designers, product partners, and technical leaders.
• Quick to pick up unfamiliar technology and apply it sensibly.
• Effective and responsible use of modern AI-assisted development workflows.
• Preferred: experience with Android or Android Automotive OS, including Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Android services, IPC, or system applications.
• Preferred: work on automotive, infotainment, embedded, robotics, consumer device, or other resource-constrained software.
• Preferred: vehicle integration, such as VHAL, vehicle services, signals, APIs, or automotive networks.
• Preferred: voice assistants or conversational products, including ASR, NLU, TTS, dialogue systems, or conversation evaluation.
• Preferred: LLM-enabled product work, such as tool use, orchestration, prompt design, grounding, evaluation, or fallback behavior.
• Preferred: designing intuitive UX for multimodal or safety-conscious settings.
• Preferred: Python, cloud-connected services, authentication, or distributed systems.
• Preferred: automated testing, observability, performance analysis, CI/CD, or field-quality feedback systems.
• No candidate is expected to have every preferred area.

Conditions

Hybrid: you are expected to work from the Mountain View, CA office at least three days a week, or more often if the business requires it.

Base salary range: $189,300 to $290,000. The actual offer falls within this range and depends on job-related factors.

This pay range is a good-faith estimate based on what a successful applicant might be paid under applicable state law. It may not be representative for positions outside the California Bay Area.

Relocation benefits may be available for this job.

The company is committed to an inclusive workplace free of unlawful discrimination.

A role-related assessment and/or pre-employment screening may be required before you start.

Benefits

• Incentive pay based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.
• Company vehicle evaluation program, open after a successful motor vehicle report review: you are assigned a company vehicle to drive and evaluate. Participants must purchase or lease a qualifying vehicle every four years unless one of a limited number of exceptions applies.