Staff Software Engineer - Core Services
About the role
Aurora’s Services Engineering organization creates full-stack solutions—including backend services, web apps, mobile apps, and real-time onboard code—that enable commercial operation of autonomous vehicle fleets at scale. The team builds the software that drives the commercial side of Aurora’s platform, such as assigning work to autonomous vehicles, providing remote support, managing fleets, and receiving customer orders.
As Aurora prepares to scale its fleet and integrate with partners via API, the Core Services team is seeking a Staff Engineer to design and build a new asset-management solution that will scale the autonomous-vehicle fleet. In this role, you will:
- Design complex systems from the ground up.
- Partner closely with software, hardware, and infrastructure engineering teams.
- Collaborate with product managers, designers, and operations stakeholders to deliver self-driving technology quickly, safely, and broadly.
- Design, implement, and maintain a micro-backend architecture running in Aurora’s AWS cloud to monitor and manage the entire Aurora commercial fleet.
- Design and implement the fleet-management solution and the vehicle-communication system.
- Establish technology and infrastructure to scale products with high availability and reliability.
- Contribute to and evolve the team culture around mentorship, feedback, collaboration, and engineering excellence.
Responsibilities
- Build large-scale, high-concurrency, high-throughput, and safety-critical backend services.
- Write effective technical specifications, provide feedback, and translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders.
- Balance speed and quality, delivering products responsibly and sustainably in a fast-growing environment.
- Proactively identify needs and address them with a self-starter mentality.
- Engage in conflict with openness, patience, and kindness, fostering a collaborative team environment.
- Own the product lifecycle end-to-end, from development through release and post-release support.
Requirements
- 7+ years of experience building backend services.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
- Experience with web communication protocols, including REST, gRPC, and GraphQL.
- Strong communication skills, with the ability to write technical specs, provide feedback, and explain complex concepts clearly.
- A preference for action, using good judgment to balance speed and quality.
- Drive to strengthen teams through collaboration, openness, and mentorship.
- Motivation to own the product lifecycle end-to-end.
Desirable Qualifications
- Experience with embedded autonomous vehicle development.
- Experience with IoT and real-time communication between devices and cloud.
- Experience with application release strategies such as feature flagging, A/B testing, and canary releases.
- Experience with observability and monitoring of safety-critical systems.
- Experience with fleet-management solutions for robots, vehicles, or aerial drones.
- Experience with external customer-facing software, including production rollouts.
- Experience with safety and mission-critical applications.
Pay
For roles based in Mountain View, CA, and San Francisco, CA: $189,000 – $303,000 per year.
For roles based in Pittsburgh, PA: $171,000 – $273,000 per year.
Aurora’s pay ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, starting base pay will be based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, relevant education or training, and market conditions. The successful candidate will also be eligible for an annual bonus, equity compensation, and benefits.
Schedule
Aurora operates in a hybrid work environment, with employees working in the office at least 3 days per week to foster collaboration, empathy, and effective leadership.