Your Role:The Vehicle Motion Planning & Control team is responsible for behavior and trajectory planning for our autonomous vehicle - deciding where the vehicle goes and how it gets there. The team also owns vehicle control (longitudinal and lateral) and the on-vehicle integration that makes our vehicles drive safely, comfortably, and predictably in the real world. The team's 6-month roadmap is to rapidly unlock new driving behaviors, like Navigate on Autopilot (NoA) on highways.
We are hiring a Software Engineer to join the team and you will own components from algorithm design through real-time C++ implementation, simulation, tuning, and on-vehicle validation. Because the team is small and the surface area is large, this role is ideal for someone with strong software fundamentals, a solid grounding in robotics or controls, and genuine eagerness to see their code move a physical vehicle.
Key Responsibilities:- Design and Build the Motion Planning Stack
- Develop trajectory planning and decision-making algorithms that produce safe, smooth, dynamically feasible motion in dynamic, uncertain environments - including scenarios with noisy or incomplete perception input
- Reason about interactions with other road users and translate desired driving behavior into algorithmic changes across the planning stack
- Develop Vehicle Control Software
- Architect, implement, and validate control and estimation algorithms for the vehicle's longitudinal and lateral dynamics
- Write mission-critical, real-time C++ that runs on-vehicle and on embedded automotive compute
- Integrate with Perception and Platform
- Work closely with our Perception and Software Platform teams to define clean interfaces between perception output, planning, and control
- Support driving-function demos on our vehicles, from bring-up through customer-facing runs
- Test, Measure, and Improve
- Build simulation and analysis tooling in Python and C++ to evaluate planner and controller performance before code ever touches a vehicle
- Define metrics for driving quality and safety, extract insights from field data, and feed them back into development
- Contribute to failure and hazard analyses and implement safety mitigations in planning and control software
What We Look For:- Ability to work from the office in Berkeley, CA, at least from Tuesday to Thursday
- 3+ years of software engineering experience, with production-quality coding skills in modern C++ and Python
- Hands-on experience in motion planning, decision making, or vehicle controls (e.g., optimization-based planning, search methods, optimal control, MPC, probabilistic decision making) on autonomous vehicles, ADAS, or robotic systems
- Solid foundation in linear algebra, geometry, statistics & probability, and vehicle dynamics
- Experience taking features from design through real-world deployment - not just prototypes
- Ability to break down complex, ambiguous problems into well-defined technical solutions
- Somebody with solid opinions based on experience, yet open-minded and flexible to find the best solution for the situation
Bonus Points:- Experience deploying planning or control software on real vehicles (AV, ADAS features like ACC, AEB, lane keeping / lane changing)
- Experience with real-time and embedded systems and RTOS
- Experience with ML-based approaches to planning (imitation learning, RL, learned cost functions) alongside classical methods
What We Offer:- Opportunity to make an impact at a young, venture-backed company in an emerging market
- Collaboration with smart and motivated engineers and ability to execute your vision in a high impact role
- Competitive salary ranging from $160,000-180,000 annually depending on experience
- Performance based Bonus
- Benefits including medical, dental, and vision insurance, flexible PTO, and equity
- Daily catered lunch and a stocked fridge in the Berkeley office
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