Principal Software Engineer (Autonomy)

Location: Sunnyvale, California, United States

Salary: $238,700–$365,700 per year, plus bonus potential

Company

hirify.global develops automotive products and autonomous-driving technologies with a vision of zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion.

What you will do

• Set the technical strategy and architecture for counterfactual behavior evaluation, including attentive-human benchmarks, intervention simulations, alternate-policy comparisons, and controlled scene perturbations.
• Convert real incidents and simulation events into executable, repeatable, provenance-preserving scenarios with characterized uncertainty.
• Implement and validate human and other road-user response models covering perception, reaction timing, maneuver selection, vehicle dynamics, and plausible outcomes.
• Build scalable pipelines for parameter extraction, scene reconstruction, counterfactual swaps, fuzzing, simulation execution, outcome estimation, and large-scale analysis.
• Define validation methods using baseline runs, replay, closed-course evidence, model limitations, confidence, and traceability to requirements.
• Lead collaboration across Behavior, Simulation, Safety, Human Factors, Legal, Product, and Operations to produce safety-case evidence and release recommendations.

Requirements

• Master’s degree in systems engineering, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, robotics, human factors, or a related field.
• 10+ years of professional experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, vehicle development, simulation, systems engineering, human factors, or safety-critical validation.
• Proven experience evaluating autonomous vehicles for commercial fleets, launches, supervised releases, or other high-consequence product decisions.
• Deep experience with counterfactual, replay, crash reconstruction, incident analysis, or comparable simulation-based evaluation capabilities.
• Experience with simulation evaluation at scale, including scenario generation, parameter sweeps, distributed execution, reproducibility, data quality, and fidelity-versus-runtime trade-offs.
• Strong Python and agentic workflow experience, plus technical leadership and communication across organizational boundaries.

Nice to have

• Experience operationalizing attentive-human benchmarks from naturalistic driving data, human factors research, expert review, or experimentally grounded response models.
• Traffic collision or incident reconstruction using vehicle logs, sensor data, maps, physical constraints, and other evidence.
• Experience with road-user behavior, collision severity, injury risk, risk quantification, safety cases, hazard analysis, or residual-risk decisions.
• Experience validating simulation fidelity against real drives, non-intervened events, closed-course tests, or other independent evidence.
• Experience translating legal or regulatory expectations into defensible reconstruction methods and documented claims.

Culture & Benefits

• Health, dental, vision, Health Savings Account, and Flexible Spending Account options.
• Retirement savings plan, sickness and accident benefits, and life insurance.
• Paid vacation and holidays, tuition assistance, and an employee assistance program.
• GM vehicle discounts and incentive compensation based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.
• Inclusive workplace focused on belonging, meaningful change, and equitable employment opportunities.