Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Perception

🚗 Staff Perception Engineer, Machine Learning

📍 San Jose, CA | Hybrid – 3 Days Onsite

The Role

We're looking for a Staff-level engineer to own ML-driven perception for a production autonomous trucking stack; from model architecture through deployment on trucks hauling real commercial freight, where our autonomous driving software powering self-driving commercial trucks on long-haul highway routes, including night driving and construction-zone handling.

Responsibilities:

• Design and own perception models for object detection, segmentation, and 3D scene understanding at highway speeds and long sensing ranges.
• Build motion forecasting models that predict the trajectories of dynamic actors — merging vehicles, lane changes, pedestrians — under real traffic conditions.
• Build and improve training pipelines, datasets, and evaluation frameworks, including transformer-based architectures for perception and forecasting.
• Optimize models for real-time inference on automotive-grade, multi-node compute platforms.
• Close the sim-to-real and lab-to-field gap, hardening models against edge cases like night driving, construction zones, and adverse weather.
• Set technical direction for the perception/ML stack and mentor other engineers.
• Partner with planning, controls, and safety teams to deploy perception in a production, safety-critical system.

Required Skills:

• Deep expertise in computer vision, deep learning, or sensor fusion, including transformer-based model architectures.
• Track record shipping ML-based perception on real, safety-critical hardware — not just benchmarks.
• Strong Python and ML framework proficiency (PyTorch or similar).
• Experience with data pipelines, large-scale model training infrastructure, and evaluation at scale.
• Experience optimizing models for real-time inference on embedded or automotive-grade compute (e.g., NVIDIA DRIVE-class platforms).
• Experience with autonomous vehicles or long-haul/highway driving domains specifically.
• Multi-sensor fusion (camera, radar, LiDAR) experience at extended sensing range.
• Experience with motion forecasting or trajectory prediction for dynamic traffic actors.