Senior Behavior Planning Engineer

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain the core behavior planning system for autonomous vehicles, enabling intelligent, interpretable, and safe decision-making in complex real-world scenarios.
• Develop and extend behavior tree architectures for hierarchical decision logic, including support for mission planning, tactical maneuvers, and contingency handling.
• Collaborate closely with the motion planning, prediction, and control teams to ensure seamless transitions from high-level decisions to executable trajectories.
• Build and optimize C++-based software infrastructure for behavior planning, including tools for simulation, debugging, visualization, and closed-loop testing.
• Evaluate planner performance in diverse real-world and simulated environments; identify failure modes and develop strategies to improve robustness and generalization.
• Participate in design reviews and system integration across the full autonomy stack.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and architectural guidance for junior team members.

Job requirements

• Ph.D. with 3+ years or Master’s with 5+ years of industry experience in robotics, autonomous systems, or behavior planning.
• Proven experience in behavior planning, including use of behavior trees, finite state machines, or rule-based planners in autonomous driving or robotics applications.
• Strong proficiency in C++ with a deep understanding of performance, memory management, and software architecture in production systems.
• Solid understanding of motion planning and prediction interfaces, with experience building real-time, safety-critical systems.
• Knowledge of diffusion models and/or Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is a strong plus.
• Strong debugging, system thinking, and collaborative communication skills.