Staff Software Engineer, Autonomy Evaluation

Description

The company is a leader in advanced driver assistance. Its hands-free system is in more than 500,000 equipped vehicles and has logged over 700 million hands-free miles. The company has the reach to bring new driving advances to everyday drivers at large scale.

The evaluation team builds the ecosystem that measures and supports the development and scaling of the company's autonomous driving technology. It creates metrics, automated workflows, and analysis methods that guide data-driven decisions across development and verification.

The team works with autonomy, simulation, systems, and safety groups as a system-level integrator and judge of end-to-end AV quality. It owns large test scenario libraries, continuous evaluation pipelines, and risk assessment and release gating components, and handles road testing, data mining, training, and metrics in one analytics framework.

In this role you will help shape core evaluation platforms, turn system results into clear feedback, and speed up validated AV deployment at scale.

Responsibilities

• Set the strategy and architecture for metrics and analyses that measure autonomous driving software across the full autonomy stack.
• Lead cross-functional work with autonomy, systems engineering, simulation, and data teams to build evaluation into development and release decisions.
• Create and advance new statistical, ML, and ML introspection methods that measure performance, catch regressions, and surface patterns in system behavior at scale.
• Own and refine the core AV evaluation metrics and KPIs behind readiness and safety calls. Present results and tradeoffs to stakeholders, and share insights with partner teams through interactive dashboards.

Requirements

• 7+ years of applied experience with robotics or autonomous systems software across several subsystems, from perception through planning and control of the vehicle.
• 3+ years leading evaluation of complex dynamic systems with numerical and ML methods on large time series data.
• Strong Python skills for production work in team settings, and the ability to work effectively in large C++ autonomy codebases.
• A track record of technical leadership across teams, including setting strategies that several teams adopt and shaping system and architecture decisions.
• A PhD, Master's, or Bachelor's degree in computer science, robotics, mechanical or aerospace engineering, machine learning, or a related field.
• Preferred: experience in autonomous driving or high-stakes field robotics, including designing, running, and interpreting large-scale simulation and field experiments.
• Preferred: solid grounding in statistical modeling, experimental design, and hypothesis testing for autonomy evaluation, plus working knowledge of Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, and visualization libraries.
• Preferred: proficiency in C++ and SQL, and experience shaping logging, data schemas, and evaluation pipelines for large-scale autonomy testing.
• Preferred: experience with ROS or other IPC, robotics stack logging, and large-scale experiment databases, including building or scaling evaluation platforms.
• Preferred: prior work in computational geometry, linear algebra, PyTorch, and machine learning.
• Preferred: background in modeling agent interaction, and in owning or designing release gating criteria and processes for autonomy systems.

Conditions

The base salary range is $185,00 to $284,100. The offer within this range will depend on factors relevant to the position.

Incentive pay is based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.

This is a hybrid role. You are expected to report to the Sunnyvale or Mountain View office three times a week, or as your manager sets.

Relocation benefits may be available if you are moving to the Bay Area.

A role-related assessment and/or pre-employment screening may be required, where applicable, before you begin employment.

The company is committed to a workplace free of unlawful discrimination that also fosters inclusion and belonging.

Benefits

• Health and wellbeing programs including medical, dental, vision, a Health Savings Account, Flexible Spending Accounts, a retirement savings plan, sickness and accident benefits, life insurance, paid vacation and holidays, tuition assistance, an employee assistance program, and vehicle discounts.
• Company vehicle evaluation program: after a motor vehicle report review, you can drive and evaluate an assigned company vehicle. Participants must buy or lease a qualifying vehicle every four years, unless one of a limited number of exceptions applies.