Principal Engineer, Autonomy (Autonomous Vehicles)

Location: United States — San Francisco, CA; New York, NY; Seattle, WA — or Toronto, ON, Canada

Company

Develops autonomous ground-handling systems for airlines and airport ground service providers, backed by venture capital and operating as a Series A company.

What you will do

• Own the technical direction and hands-on development of one or more autonomy areas: perception, prediction, or planning.
• Design perception systems for detection, classification, tracking, and multimodal sensor fusion across real-world operating conditions.
• Develop prediction models for intent inference, behavior forecasting, occlusion handling, and edge cases.
• Design planning and decision-making systems for structured driving behaviors and autonomous ground-support-equipment maneuvers.
• Define interfaces across the autonomy stack and own its functional and software architecture.
• Set technical direction, mentor senior engineers, and report to the VP of Engineering without direct reports.

Requirements

• 15+ years of hands-on experience building production autonomy systems across multiple modules, including localization, perception, prediction, planning, or controls.
• Production experience shipping autonomy components on real vehicles at non-trivial scale.
• Experience serving as the most senior individual contributor in an autonomy organization.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals in C++ and Python.
• Practical experience with deep learning model training, evaluation, deployment, and lifecycle management for autonomy.
• Experience with ROS or ROS 2 and on-vehicle distributed systems, including real-time constraints, IPC, and fault containment.

Nice to have

• Experience with safety-critical or functional-safety-relevant systems, including ISO 26262, ISO 13849, SOTIF, or aerospace equivalents.
• Experience with operational design domains involving human interaction, mixed traffic, or unstructured environments.
• Familiarity with simulation-driven verification and simulation in autonomy CI/CD pipelines.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on commercial autonomy in airport environments with real operational constraints.
• Contribute to a deployed system with a defined path toward removing the safety driver and scaling the fleet.
• Hold the senior-most technical individual contributor role across perception, prediction, and planning.
• Influence autonomy architecture and technical decisions across the organization.