Sr. Staff Systems Engineer Autonomy

Your mission is to define, validate, and maintain a coherent system architecture that balances high-performance compute requirements with the rigorous safety and redundancy standards of autonomous driving. This is a high-impact, individual contributor role for a seasoned expert who has previously steered the architectural direction of large-scale autonomous vehicle (AV) programs.

• Synthesize architectures and requirements from the Sensing, Compute, and Actuation into a unified autonomy architecture and set of requirements for the hardware and vehicle platform teams.

• Lead trade-off studies to resolve conflicting requirements and providing data-driven recommendations to the leadership

• Lead the Fail-Operational strategy for different failure modes or degradations within the autonomy sensing, compute and actuation to execute a minimum risk maneuver.

• Identify functional/performance gaps in current architectures. Lead stakeholder engagement to devise and implement mitigations that resolve bottlenecks.

• Coordinate with cross-functional teams to ensure infrastructure systems—including Low-Voltage Power Distribution, Connectivity, and Thermal Management (Coolant Flow)—are appropriately sized and redundant to meet autonomy demands during nominal and fail-operational scenarios.

• Maintain a "big picture" view to ensure architectural coherence. Identify opportunities to standardize interfaces and modules across various hardware versions and vehicle platforms to reduce complexity and engineering overhead.

• Maintain a rigorous, systematic record of architectural diagrams, interface documents, and design assumptions to ensure long-term maintainability and traceability for audits.

• Serve as the primary representative for the Autonomy team in vehicle-level architectural design reviews.

• Drive cross-functional consensus among software and hardware engineering, regulatory compliance, and executive leadership regarding the technical architecture and strategic roadmap.

• Advanced degree (Master’s or Ph.D.) in Computer Science, Robotics, Systems Engineering or a related technical field .

• 10+ years (Master’s)/8+ years (Ph.Ds) of experience in systems engineering or software development in autonomous driving or robotics industry, preferably in leading the architecture of a complex system-of-systems from initial concept through production or large-scale deployment.

• Expertise in ML-driven autonomous vehicle stacks, coupled with a forward-looking grasp of state-of-the-art architectures, methodologies, and emerging technologies in the AV space.

• Extensive knowledge of sensor modalities (LiDAR, radar, high-res cameras, GNSS, IMU) and how to manage their data pipelines.

• Experience of selecting and optimizing edge-compute platforms while managing power and thermal constraints

• Familiarity with functional safety standards (ISO 26262) and SOTIF (ISO 21448).

• Excellent team player with strong communication and presentation skills.