Senior Manager, Engineering - Learned Vehicle Intent (Hands-On) (Robotics)

TL;DR

Senior Manager, Engineering - Learned Vehicle Intent (Hands-On) (Robotics): Lead teams developing and scaling learned behavior models for autonomous trucking systems with an accent on reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and multi-agent interactions. Focus on defining technical roadmaps, building scalable training pipelines, integrating models into the autonomy stack, and ensuring production-ready safety and robustness.

Location: Remote in the United States or hybrid in Ann Arbor, MI or Blacksburg, VA offices

Salary: $195,500 - $234,600 USD

Company

Leader in autonomous driving software for trucks since 2007, now part of the Daimler family, focused on commercializing solutions for automated freight.

What you will do

• Own technical vision and roadmap for Learned Vehicle Intent, aligning with product and safety goals
• Lead and scale 2–3 teams of ML engineers across model development, training, and deployment
• Guide architecture for policy learning systems including RL, behavior cloning, and multi-agent models
• Drive scalable training pipelines, data infrastructure, and experimentation frameworks
• Partner with perception, prediction, planning, simulation, and safety teams for stack integration
• Ensure model validation, failure analysis, and performance tracking in simulation and real-world
• Mentor engineers and lead planning, execution, hiring, and organizational design

Requirements

• 10+ years in applied ML, autonomy, robotics
• Staff-level expertise in reinforcement learning, imitation learning, multi-agent systems
• 5+ years leading engineering teams
• Success defining and delivering ML system roadmaps
• Strong Python and ML frameworks like PyTorch
• Experience with ML architectures, scaling, data pipelines, production deployment in autonomy/robotics
• Cross-functional collaboration skills

Nice to have

• Experience in autonomous vehicles, trucking, large-scale robotics
• Deploying RL/learned models in production
• Simulation, scenario generation, validation frameworks
• Ray or distributed training
• System-level ML integration into planning/control
• PhD in CS/AI with learned behaviors/RL track record

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive package with bonus, stock options
• 100% paid medical, dental, vision for full-time
• 401K with 6% employer match
• Flexible schedule, generous paid vacation from day one
• Company-wide holiday closures, AD&D, life insurance
• Collaborative, energetic, team-focused culture