Vehicle Controls- Technical Lead

About the company

Applied Intuition, Inc. is powering the future of physical AI. Founded in 2017 and valued at $15 billion, the company creates the digital infrastructure needed to bring intelligence to every moving machine on the planet. Applied Intuition serves the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining, and agriculture industries in three core areas: tools and infrastructure, operating systems, and autonomy. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices worldwide. Applied Intuition is an in-office company, expecting full-time employees to primarily work from their office 5 days a week, with flexibility for occasional remote work or adjusted schedules as needed.

About the role

As a Technical Lead for Controls, you will own the technical direction of our controls stack across its full lifecycle — from 0→1 development on new vehicle platforms to hardening, calibrating, and scaling controllers across production fleets. The systems you lead are high-performance and safety-critical, operating under tight timing constraints on real machines in the field. This role spans the full controls stack, including low-level actuation, vehicle characterization, and high-level trajectory tracking (both lateral and longitudinal).

You will work on a variety of vehicle platforms, such as haul trucks, excavators, wheel loaders, dozers, and other heavy equipment across construction, mining, and agriculture. In addition to technical leadership, you will mentor and grow the existing controls team, set priorities across competing work streams, and establish best practices.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for the controls stack across both 0→1 platform bring-up and production programs, seeing designs through from prototype to deployed fleet.
• Design and implement controllers at every level of the stack, from low-level actuator control to lateral and longitudinal trajectory tracking.
• Design safe, redundant control systems that operate within a safety-critical environment.
• Characterize the dynamics of customer vehicles across many embodiments to create tailored controls solutions and close the gap between simulation and real-world behavior.
• Build calibration and vehicle characterization workflows that scale controls performance from a single prototype to fleets of vehicles without per-vehicle hand-tuning.
• Lead, mentor, and grow the existing controls team; set priorities, unblock engineers, and raise the technical bar through design reviews and hands-on collaboration.
• Evaluate and apply academic research to create optimal-control-based solutions using techniques like nonlinear MPC and MPPI control.
• Collaborate with customers' engineers in construction, mining, and agriculture, and manage those relationships through field deployments.

Requirements

• Passion for tackling challenging control problems involving a wide array of vehicles in varied and unstructured environments.
• 6+ years of experience building production software using modern software practices, including experience leading engineers or owning a technical area.
• Hands-on experience taking controls solutions from first prototype through deployment on real, production-grade vehicles.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, prioritize a team's roadmap, and drive technical decisions across multiple concurrent workstreams.
• Fluency in differential equations, numerical optimization, numerical analysis, and physics.
• Enthusiasm for coming up with practical solutions to cutting-edge challenges in a fast-paced environment, and for building towards an end-to-end strategy.

Nice to have

• MSc or PhD in mechanical engineering, robotics, or computer science with coursework or research experience in controls.
• Experience writing safety-critical, high-performance software using modern C++.
• Experience in quadratic programming and nonlinear optimization to create robust and performant controllers.
• Experience with heavy equipment or off-road platforms in construction, mining, or agriculture.
• Experience building calibration pipelines or system identification tooling used across a fleet.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance coverage.
• 401k retirement benefits with employer match.
• Learning and wellness stipends.
• Paid time off.

Pay

Compensation at Applied Intuition for eligible roles includes base salary, equity, and benefits. The intended target base salary range for this position is $150,000 - $250,000. The actual base salary offered will be influenced by factors such as experience, credentials, educational attainment, skill level requirements, and interview performance.