Job SummaryMay Mobility is entering an exciting phase of growth as we expand our first-of-its-kind autonomous shuttle and mobility services across the nation. Launched in 2017 with a strong team of experienced roboticists and software engineers with decades of experience fielding robotic systems in the wild, May Mobility is looking to expand its team of robotics engineers with a background in robotics or autonomous vehicles.
As Perception Lead, you will own the technical direction of how our vehicles see and interpret the world. This is a hands-on role focused on three priorities: advancing scene detection so the system reliably recognizes its operating context and engages the right behavior; hardening perception against sensor degradation and adverse weather (rain, snow, fog, glare, low light, and sensor soiling or occlusion) so performance degrades gracefully and safely; and driving major architectural updates to evolve our perception stack into a scalable, maintainable, production-grade foundation. You will set the technical bar, mentor engineers, and deliver capabilities that operate safely in the real world.
Essential Responsibilities- Work independently with cross-functional teams to develop software and system requirements.
- Lead major architectural updates to the perception stack, including system-level design, modularization, and migration strategies that improve scalability, latency, and maintainability across the fleet.
- Design, develop, and own scene detection and activation capabilities, classifying the operating scene/scenario and triggering the appropriate perception behaviors and operational design domain (ODD) logic at runtime.
- Improve perception robustness under degradation and adverse weather, including sensor fault detection, health monitoring, graceful degradation, and fallback strategies for rain, snow, fog, glare, low-light, and sensor soiling/occlusion conditions.
- Design, implement, and test state-of-the-art perception features on time with high quality, industrial-grade production code.
- Integrate large-scale multi-modal models (including but not limited to VLMs and LLMs) into the perception stack to improve semantic scene understanding and reasoning.
- Track and trend technical performance of perception in the field.
- Lead major feature development including feature design, code reviews, issue diagnosis, and resolution.
- Lead extensive testing to validate features and satisfy release schedules.
- Lead development related to data, development, and ML pipelines, specifically focused on multimodal data alignment for training foundation models.
Skills and AbilitiesSuccess in this role typically requires the following competencies:
- Proven ability to architect and evolve large-scale perception or autonomy systems, balancing performance, latency, safety, and long-term maintainability.
- Strong grasp of perception robustness and reliability engineering, including degraded-sensor operation, adverse-weather handling, fault detection, and graceful degradation.
- Experience with scene/scenario understanding and runtime activation logic (e.g., context classification, ODD monitoring, behavior triggering).
- Familiar with ML development cycle, deployment, and optimization.
- Deep understanding of data: data pipeline, data balancing, data mining, and data-driven performance improvement.
- Knowledge of multimodal learning techniques, including contrastive learning and prompt engineering for zero-shot visual recognition.
- Deep understanding of testing frameworks and workflows.
- Excellent attention to detail and rigorous testing methodology.
- Exceptional written and verbal communication skills and team-leading abilities.
Qualifications and ExperienceCandidates most successful in this role typically hold the following qualifications or comparable knowledge or experience:
Required- A minimum of 5+ years of industry experience working on real-world robot systems maintaining high-quality industrial-grade code.
- Master's degree in Robotics, Computer Science, or Computer Engineering, or a field that requires a strong mathematical and/or engineering foundation.
- Demonstrated experience leading or making major architectural decisions for a perception, robotics, or autonomy software stack.
- Strong programming skills in C/C++/Python; software development in Linux environments.
- Strong experience in ML/DL development with PyTorch/TensorFlow.
- Direct experience developing or fine-tuning large-scale multi-modal models (e.g., multi-sensor fusion models, foundation models, including VLM backbones) for real-world perception applications.
- Experience working on a combination of several of the following real-time areas:
- Computer Vision: object detection, classification, segmentation.
- Semantic scene understanding, scene/scenario detection, and open-vocabulary detection.
- Perception robustness in degraded or adverse-weather conditions.
- Multi-target tracking and sensor fusion.
- Extensive experience deploying features/ML/DL models in real-time systems with high accuracy and low latency.
Desirable- Experience developing all-weather / adverse-condition perception, sensor degradation modeling, fault detection, and graceful-degradation strategies for safety-critical systems.
- Experience with scene/scenario classification, ODD monitoring, and runtime capability activation in autonomous systems.
- Experience re-architecting or migrating large, legacy perception systems to modern, scalable frameworks.
- Experience utilizing large-scale multi-modal models for edge-case (long-tail) detection and explainable AI in autonomous systems.
- Familiar with synthetic data in ML system development.
- Familiar with Reinforcement Learning (RL) for ML systems.
- Familiar with ML/DL optimization on real-time products with limited compute resources (e.g., quantization of large transformer models).
- Strong background demonstrated through high-quality capability deliveries to robots working in the field.
Physical Requirements- Standard office working conditions which includes but is not limited to:
- Prolonged sitting
- Prolonged standing
- Prolonged computer use
- Travel required? - Moderate: 11%-25%
Benefits and Perks- Comprehensive healthcare suite including medical, dental, vision, life, and disability plans. Domestic partners who have been residing together at least one year are also eligible to participate.
- Health Savings and Flexible Spending Healthcare and Dependent Care Accounts available.
- Rich retirement benefits, including an immediately vested employer safe harbor match.
- Generous paid parental leave as well as a phased return to work.
- Flexible vacation policy in addition to paid company holidays.
- Total Wellness Program providing numerous resources for overall wellbeing
Salary Range
$235,000-$275,000 USD
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