Position Overview:

As a Senior Autonomy Engineer on our R&D team, you'll help define the next generation of software that lets robots perceive, learn, and act in unstructured indoor environments. You'll work across the modern autonomy stack - from learned perception and prediction to mapping and motion planning - and ship capabilities that generalize across our fleet. We're looking for someone equally comfortable reading a fresh arXiv paper, writing production C++/Python, and debugging behavior on a real robot in the lab. You'll help set technical direction, raise the bar on engineering quality, and mentor others on the team.

Essential Job Functions:

• Design, train, and deploy machine learning systems for perception, SLAM, prediction, and motion planning that enable safe navigation around people and obstacles.
• Build and improve learned components - including transformer-based perception, vision-language models for scene understanding, diffusion or imitation-learning policies, and neural/Gaussian-splatting approaches to mapping - and integrate them with classical estimation and planning where it makes sense.
• Translate state-of-the-art research (papers, open-source releases, conference talks) into production-quality implementations on the robot.
• Develop data engines and evaluation infrastructure that turn fleet logs into training data, regression tests, and shipped improvements.
• Own features end-to-end: from prototype, through sim and on-robot validation, to fleet rollout, with measurement of real-world impact.
• Improve runtime performance of perception, mapping, and planning on embedded GPU/accelerator hardware (quantization, distillation, kernel work where warranted).
• Contribute to internal frameworks, simulation tooling, and developer experience that compound team velocity.
• Provide guidance and mentorship to engineers across robotics, ML, and the software systems that support them.

Education and/or Work Experience Requirements:

• Master's Degree. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field - or equivalent demonstrated experience.
• 5+ years of relevant industry or research experience building autonomy, perception, or ML systems
• Strong fluency in Python and C++ in a Linux environment.
• Demonstrated track record of taking research ideas and papers into deployed implementations.
• Depth in one or more of: machine learning (supervised, self-supervised, imitation, RL), SLAM and state estimation, motion planning, or 3D perception.

Required Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, and Other Characteristics:

• Hands-on experience with PyTorch (and/or JAX), modern training pipelines, and contemporary architectures (transformers, diffusion models, vision-language-action models).
• Experience designing robotic systems with ROS 2 (or comparable middleware) and contemporary simulation tools such as Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, or Gazebo.
• Comfort with the full ML lifecycle: data curation and labeling strategy, large-scale training, offline and online evaluation, and continuous deployment to production hardware.
• Solid systems and software architecture instincts; pragmatism about when a learned approach beats a classical one and vice versa.
• Familiarity with modern engineering practices: CI/CD, code review, observability, and iterative delivery (i.e. Agile, Scrum).
• Bonus: Contributions to open-source robotics or ML projects, publications at top venues (CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS, CVPR, ICML), or experience with on-device acceleration (TensorRT, ONNX, custom CUDA kernels).

Physical Demands:

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. Essential functions may require maintaining the physical condition necessary for sitting, walking or standing for periods of time; operating a computer and keyboard; talk and hear at normal room levels; using hands to finger, grasp, and feel; repetitive motion; close visual acuity to prepare and analyze data and figures; transcribing; viewing a computer terminal; extensive reading; lift, push, carry, or pull up to 20 pounds.

Work Environment:

The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. The noise level in the work environment is usually quiet to moderate. Employees are exposed to the typical office environment with computers, printers and telephones.

Salary Range:

The anticipated salary range for candidates who will work in San Diego, California is $179,505 to $224,381. The final salary offered to a successful candidate will be dependent on several factors that may include but are not limited to the type and length of experience within the job, type and length of experience within the industry, education, etc. Brain Corp is a multi-state employer and this salary range may not reflect positions that work in other states.

In addition to base pay, our competitive total rewards package consists of:

• A discretionary annual target bonus
• Stock options
• 401(k) plan with match (no waiting period and immediate vesting)
• Comprehensive suite of insurance benefits for employees (and their families) to include a variety of medical plan options (including an HSA with employer contribution), dental, vision, life and disability insurance, Employee Assistance Program (EAP), Legal/Identity support plans, pet insurance.
• Access to Flexible Spending Accounts (Medical and Dependent Care)
• Generous paid time off including flexible vacation, Paid Sick Leave, time off for volunteering in the community, 10 paid company holidays, and a winter company shutdown

Additional Perks include:

• Daily on-site lunch available in the San Diego office
• On-campus gym including pool and tennis courts in the San Diego office
• Opportunities to connect with colleagues including monthly game nights, hikes, wellness challenges, and community events
• Internal continuous learning events
• Opportunities to share your own interests and hobbies with the Company