Controls Engineer (Autonomous Vehicles)

Location: London, United Kingdom; hybrid working with in-person collaboration in office spaces, remote work, and hands-on work in vehicle workshops and labs.

Company

hirify.global is building an end-to-end AI platform for autonomous driving, enabling vehicles to learn from real-world experience and adapt across vehicle platforms and OEM applications.

What you will do

• Develop, integrate, tune, and validate control, trajectory-generation, and action-processing algorithms across vehicle platforms, operating modes, and challenging driving conditions.
• Maintain the controls software architecture connecting AI Driver outputs with real-time vehicle actuation and feedback.
• Implement and maintain production-quality, latency-sensitive control software in C++ for prototype, reference, and production vehicles.
• Use simulation, closed-loop evaluation, and on-road testing to characterize controller behaviour, diagnose issues, and validate improvements.
• Own requirements, release readiness, in-field performance, issue triage, controller interfaces, and lifecycle integration with adjacent systems.
• Define quality metrics including comfort, tracking error, and safety-margin KPIs, and contribute evidence to safety cases and standards compliance.

Requirements

• Strong fundamentals in control theory, with applied experience in one or more of optimization, model-predictive control, numerical methods, or dynamical systems.
• Practical experience developing, tuning, and validating motion control on complex real-world physical systems, such as mobile robotics or autonomous vehicles.
• Experience with testing and validation discipline, including unit and integration tests, simulation regression suites, and closed-loop metrics.
• Strong software engineering skills and experience building reliable production-quality systems in C++.
• Experience with latency-sensitive or real-time software.
• Ability to reason about and debug system-level behaviour across complex robotic software and hardware systems.

Nice to have

• Applied machine learning experience or experience developing systems that integrate with ML components.
• Vehicle dynamics and actuation experience, including steering, braking, powertrain interfaces, actuator-delay models, and CAN or similar vehicle-bus experience.
• Automotive industry experience, including ADAS or vehicle controls.
• Experience with safety-critical systems, validation, and relevant standards such as ISO 26262.
• Experience with monitoring and diagnostics, including logging, fault detection, on-platform debugging, and investigation of field issues.
• Experience supporting multiple vehicle platforms, including parameter identification, calibration, vehicle-to-vehicle variation, and maintaining one software stack across hardware variants.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid working combines office collaboration with focused remote work, core hours, and hands-on access to vehicle workshops and labs.
• Relocation support and visa sponsorship are available where applicable.
• Market-benchmarked salaries, meaningful equity, learning and development budgets, and support for training and conferences.
• Benefits may include health insurance, dental coverage, enhanced maternity and paternity leave, retirement or pension arrangements, therapy access, wellbeing partnerships, and team socials.
• The company is still defining many of its processes, offering substantial ownership to people comfortable working without a fully established structure.

Hiring process

• Initial recruiter call covering background, current situation, interests, and hirify.global context.
• Competency interviews covering programming and code review, followed by deep-dive technical interviews on domain knowledge and system design.
• Final interview focused on mission and values alignment.