Senior Motion Planning Software Engineer (Robotics)

TL;DR

Senior Motion Planning Software Engineer (Robotics): Build real-time trajectory generation and decision-making for autonomous drone flight with an accent on collision avoidance, large-scale multi-agent planning, and joint optimization. Focus on scaling to 10,000+ flights/day, planning in uncertain environments with complex dynamics, and validating safety metrics using real fleet data.

Location: South San Francisco, California, USA

Salary: $200,000 - $245,000

Company

World’s largest and most experienced drone delivery service, designing, building, and operating autonomous logistics systems on four continents.

What you will do

• Build real-time trajectory generation and decision-making for autonomous flight using search-based, sampling, MPC, and optimization methods.
• Design collision avoidance and large-scale multi-agent planning for fleet deconfliction, airspace rules, and traffic management.
• Tackle joint optimization across safety, energy, time, and reliability under mission and vehicle constraints.
• Plan in uncertain environments handling wind, turbulence, degraded sensors, and partial observability.
• Extend autonomy stack for new aircraft and payloads with clean interfaces to perception and controls.
• Validate through scenario libraries, SIL/HIL simulation, log replay, fault-injection, and real fleet data analysis.

Requirements

• Master's degree in Computer Science or related field and 3+ years of experience building software for safety-critical systems (aerospace/AV/robotics/medical)
• Strong in Rust/C++/C for real-time, fault-tolerant code on embedded/Linux
• Depth in planning & search (A*/anytime/RRT*/sampling), trajectory optimization/MPC, or multi-agent deconfliction shipped on real robots/vehicles
• Hands-on with simulation at scale, SIL/HIL, log replay, and metrics-driven validation
• Evidence of shipping production-grade autonomy through ambiguous, noisy conditions
• Systems thinker who collaborates with perception, controls, and flight ops with crisp docs and design reviews

Culture & Benefits

• Impact at scale with thousands of daily missions delivering essential goods.
• Technical frontier in real-time multi-agent autonomy and robustness at massive scale.
• High-leverage IC ownership shaping the global fleet's flight stack.
• Equity compensation, discretionary bonuses, medical/dental/vision insurance, paid time off.
• Equal opportunity employer valuing diversity.