Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Motion Planning

About the role

We are seeking senior or staff software engineers to join our planning team to build motion planning and decision-making systems and help mature new products all the way through to production. Our planning team calculates safe paths for the autonomous vehicle to follow using mapping data, localization data, waypoints, and predicted actors around the vehicle. Your contribution will improve planning for emergency situations and planning for complicated maneuvers such as loading dock access and variable lane changes.

This role is onsite 5 days a week at our Mountain View, CA office!

What you'll do

• Design, build, and test the algorithms for motion and behavior planning for autonomous driving on urban roads and highways.
• Provide end-to-end ownership of the path planning and decision-making systems, ensuring that the behavior of Gatik's vehicles is safe, smooth, and predictable to other road users.
• Build tools that prioritize and debug issues and contribute to the development of simulation architecture to enable Gatik's software stack to be trained, tested, prototyped, and validated in a virtual environment.
• Develop a thorough understanding of the constraints and challenges of path planning for Gatik's unique use case and ODD.
• Own the vehicle functions end to end, integrate the algorithms into Gatik's software stack, and mature them to production quality.
• Automate scenario generation of on-road experiences using analytical and learned techniques

What we're looking for

• Ph.D. with 3+ years of industry experience or Master's degree with 5+ years of relevant industry experience
• Deep expertise in search-based planning, model predictive control (MPC), optimization, and/or trajectory generation
• Proficient in C++ with hands-on experience in Python
• Proven experience in designing and implementing real-time, on-device behavior and motion planning/control algorithms
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate cross-functionally with engineers on system integration and large-scale product deployment
• Strong background in conducting thorough code and design reviews