Staff Autonomy Engineer
Brain Corp2 months ago
Base Salary
$210k - $262k/yr
Responsibilities
- Set technical direction and multi-quarter roadmaps for areas such as perception, SLAM, prediction, planning, and ML systems.
- Lead ambiguous, cross-functional autonomy projects from problem definition and technical approach through fleet deployment.
- Architect and contribute to systems involving learned perception, transformer-based detectors, VLMs, SLAM, Gaussian splatting, implicit representations, behavior prediction, and motion planning.
- Drive adoption and production integration of imitation learning, diffusion policies, vision-language-action models, reinforcement learning, and classical autonomy components.
- Build data engines and evaluation infrastructure that convert fleet logs into training data, regression suites, and production improvements.
- Optimize and deploy models on embedded GPU and accelerator hardware using techniques such as quantization and distillation.
- Partner with engineering managers, product, and hardware on staffing, sequencing, risk, and roadmap decisions.
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through technical guidance, design reviews, code reviews, and modeled engineering standards.
- Lead hiring activities, interview-loop design, candidate calibration, closing, and onboarding.
- Improve testing, observability, documentation, simulation infrastructure, and developer tooling across the organization.
Requirements
- Master’s degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent demonstrated experience.
- 7+ years of industry experience in embodied AI, robotics, self-driving, drones, or a similar field, including some senior or lead experience.
- Deep expertise in at least two of machine learning, SLAM and state estimation, robotic perception, and motion planning.
- Strong fluency in C++ and Python in a Linux environment.
- Demonstrated experience taking research ideas into production at meaningful scale.
- Hands-on expertise with PyTorch and/or JAX, modern training infrastructure, transformers, diffusion models, and VLA/foundation models.
- Experience designing robotic systems with ROS 2 or comparable middleware and simulation environments such as Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, or Gazebo.
- Experience shipping ML-driven features to production hardware, including monitoring, debugging, rollback, and on-call support.
- Strong systems and architectural judgment, software engineering fundamentals, written and verbal communication, and cross-functional leadership.
- Preferred experience includes TensorRT, ONNX, custom CUDA kernels, large-scale data infrastructure, distributed-team leadership, and research publications or open-source impact.
Benefits
- Discretionary annual target bonus and stock options.
- 401(k) plan with match, no waiting period, and immediate vesting.
- Medical, dental, vision, life, disability, HSA, Employee Assistance Program, legal/identity support, and pet insurance benefits.
- Medical and dependent-care Flexible Spending Accounts.
- Flexible vacation, paid sick leave, volunteer time off, 10 paid company holidays, and a winter company shutdown.
- Daily on-site lunch, an on-campus gym with pool and tennis courts, colleague events, wellness activities, community events, and internal continuous learning opportunities at the San Diego office.
Categories
ML EngineeringRobotics
About Brain Corp
Brain Corp develops BrainOS, an autonomy software platform that powers autonomous mobile robots used in commercial public spaces, especially retail, for floor cleaning and inventory management. The company licenses its software to OEM partners and enterprises, with services that support deployment and fleet operations; more than 30,000 AMRs run on BrainOS. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Diego, it is privately held and backed by investors including SoftBank Vision Fund and Qualcomm Ventures.