Senior Sensor Simulation Engineer, Radar

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Set sensor simulation direction. Own the multi-quarter technical roadmap for radar, lidar, and thermal modeling — which fidelity gaps matter, which modalities we add, and how the work sequences.
• Build physically accurate sensor models. Radar as the primary focus — RF propagation, RCS, Doppler, multipath, antenna patterns, and raw pre-detection output — extending across lidar and thermal/LWIR.
• Validate against real sensor data. Define the metrics and methodology that quantify how close our output is to measured reality, and drive model improvements from what that analysis tells you.
• Model the hard conditions. Weather and environmental effects — rain, wetness, snow accumulation, low visibility — are where sensor fidelity gets interesting.
• Set the standard for scientific rigor. Extend the validation discipline you bring on radar and lidar across the rest of the sensor suite, camera included.
• Partner with perception and ML teams. Translate real-world perception failure modes into concrete, prioritized fidelity requirements — both internally and in technical conversations with customers evaluating our output.
• Grow the team's depth. Provide technical direction to the engineers working in this area, and raise the bar on how the broader team reasons about sensor physics.
• Use AI tooling actively. LLM-assisted coding and literature review meaningfully accelerate this kind of work. We expect fluency here — the bottleneck in this role is physical insight, not typing speed, and we want you…

Job requirements

• Experience. A track record of building simulation, sensor-modeling, or computational-physics software that was actually deployed and relied upon.
• Physics-first foundation. Strong grounding in physics, applied physics, or electrical engineering — frequently an MSc or PhD, though we care about the depth of understanding rather than the credential.
• Radar and RF depth. Radar signal processing, automotive or industrial radar domain experience, or a closely adjacent RF/electromagnetics background you're ready to apply to simulation.
• Sensor physics breadth. Deep grounding in the physics of one or more sensing modalities — radar/RF, lidar, thermal/infrared, or electro-optical — and the underlying math: EM propagation, signal processing, radiometry,…
• Validation rigor. Demonstrated experience validating models against real measured sensor data and reasoning carefully about accuracy, error, and what a discrepancy is actually telling you.
• Productive in C++. Our engineering team works primarily in modern C++. You don't need to be a language expert, but you must be genuinely effective at writing, debugging, and extending performance-sensitive code in a…
• Technical leadership. Ability to set direction, not just execute it — to look at a domain, form a view on where it's going, argue for it, and then deliver against it.
• Communication. Comfortable moving between a physics discussion with a researcher, an implementation discussion with a graphics engineer, and a roadmap discussion with product and executive stakeholders.