Senior Software Engineer, Motion Planning

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Design, implement, and optimize the motion planning stack for autonomous vehicles, enabling safe, comfortable, and efficient driving in diverse real-world environments.
• Develop lattice-based planners, sampling-based planners, and optimization-based methods for generating dynamically feasible, collision-free trajectories.
• Integrate constraints from perception, prediction, and control to generate context-aware motion plans under uncertainty.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with behavior planning, control, and mapping teams to ensure robust and consistent planning behavior.
• Optimize and maintain C++-based infrastructure for trajectory generation, evaluation, and deployment in real-time onboard systems.
• Analyze closed-loop simulation and on-road performance; identify and resolve failure cases involving traffic interactions, occlusions, or dynamic obstacles.

Job requirements

• Ph.D. with 3+ years or Master’s with 5+ years of experience in robotics, motion planning, or autonomous systems.
• Deep expertise in at least two of the following: lattice-based planning, trajectory optimization, model predictive control, or search-based planning.
• Strong proficiency in C++, with experience in production-quality code for real-time or safety-critical systems.
• Solid understanding of vehicle dynamics, control interfaces, and motion feasibility constraints.
• Experience with simulation tools and debugging motion planner behavior in realistic driving environments.
• Knowledge of diffusion models and/or Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is a strong plus.
• Excellent analytical and system-level debugging skills; strong communication and cross-functional collaboration capabilities.