Staff Engineer, Autonomous Driving Data Platform & Curation
CARIAD, Inc.6 days ago
Mountain View, CA, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$162k - $234k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design canonical representations for autonomous-driving data including drives, scenarios, clips, frames, trajectories, sensor references, vehicle state, map context, labels, predictions, and manifests.
- Build and maintain validated, versioned datasets exceeding 10 million records or samples on local or cloud object storage.
- Evaluate and optimize Parquet, Apache Arrow, Lance, partitioning, indexing, file sizing, compaction, schema evolution, query performance, and model data loading.
- Build distributed ingestion, transformation, enrichment, validation, cataloging, and publication pipelines with retries, backfills, idempotency, and observability.
- Define quality gates, dashboards, alerts, statistical monitoring, drift and anomaly detection, and rule-based or model-based scenario tagging.
- Design auto-labeling, active-learning, model-in-the-loop, and human-in-the-loop workflows with review routing, audit sampling, provenance, and quality controls.
- Close the loop from model failures and edge cases through data selection, annotation, publication, training, and evaluation.
- Prepare replayable trajectory datasets for imitation learning and offline reinforcement learning.
- Own dataset architecture, storage and query performance, data quality, reliability, reproducibility, cost, and technical escalation.
- Align cross-functional teams, maintain data contracts and lineage, lead design reviews, and mentor engineers.
Requirements
- Master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related field is required; a PhD is desired.
- 8+ years of experience in applied machine learning or deep learning.
- 4+ years of experience in reinforcement learning, computer vision, or autonomous-driving/ADAS systems.
- Production ownership of large data pipelines and datasets exceeding 10 million records or samples or comparable multi-terabyte scale.
- Strong experience with dataset schema design, columnar storage, partitioning, compression, predicate pushdown, indexing, compaction, versioning, lineage, and reproducibility.
- Hands-on experience with Parquet, Lance, Apache Arrow, or comparable analytical dataset technologies.
- Strong Python and SQL skills with production software-engineering practices including testing, code review, version control, profiling, debugging, maintainable APIs, and documentation.
- Experience with distributed or parallel data pipelines and orchestration using Ray, Spark, Beam, Dask, Airflow, Dagster, or comparable systems.
- Experience with local or cloud object storage such as S3 or GCS, including caching, data movement, reliability, access control, and cost considerations.
- Knowledge of multimodal autonomous-driving or robotics data, including sensor synchronization, calibration, coordinate frames, trajectories, scenarios, and annotations.
- Experience with auto-labeling, active learning, model-in-the-loop or human-in-the-loop systems, statistical monitoring, distribution comparison, drift measurement, anomaly detection, and out-of-distribution detection.
- Experience optimizing distributed ML data loading, caching, sampling, preprocessing, and data-to-GPU performance.
- Experience preparing sequential or trajectory data for imitation learning, offline reinforcement learning, preference or ranking data, reward modeling, or policy evaluation.
- Familiarity with governance, privacy, retention, redaction, access control, auditability, and security requirements for fleet-collected sensor data; equivalent industry experience will be considered.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
- 401k with employer match and defined contribution plan.
- Short- and long-term disability, basic life and AD&D insurance, and employee assistance program.
- Tuition reimbursement and student loan repayment plans.
- Maternity and non-primary caregiver leave and adoption assistance.
- Employee referral program, vacation, and paid holidays.
- Vehicle lease program covering registration and insurance fees.
- Performance-based merit increases and annual bonus.
- Mountain View, California salary range of $196,267-$269,203; the posting states that the range depends on geography, credentials, certifications, experience, qualification, and training.
Tech Stack
Categories
Data EngineeringML Engineering