Vehicle Controls- Technical Lead
Applied IntuitionBase Salary
$150k - $250k/yr
Responsibilities
- Set the technical direction for the controls stack across prototype platform bring-up and production programs.
- Design and implement controllers spanning low-level actuator control and lateral and longitudinal trajectory tracking.
- Design safe, redundant control systems for safety-critical environments.
- Characterize customer vehicle dynamics and close the gap between simulation and real-world behavior.
- Build calibration and vehicle-characterization workflows that scale across vehicle fleets without per-vehicle hand-tuning.
- Lead, mentor, and grow the controls team while setting priorities, unblocking engineers, and raising technical standards.
- Evaluate academic research and apply nonlinear MPC and MPPI techniques to develop optimal-control solutions.
- Collaborate with customer engineers and manage relationships through field deployments.
Requirements
- 6+ years of experience building production software using modern software practices, including experience leading engineers or owning a technical area.
- Hands-on experience taking controls solutions from prototype through deployment on production-grade vehicles.
- Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, prioritize a team roadmap, and drive technical decisions across concurrent workstreams.
- Fluency in differential equations, numerical optimization, numerical analysis, and physics.
- Passion for challenging control problems involving varied vehicles and unstructured environments.
- MSc or PhD in mechanical engineering, robotics, or computer science with controls coursework or research experience is preferred.
- Experience writing safety-critical, high-performance software using modern C++ is preferred.
- Experience with quadratic programming and nonlinear optimization for robust, performant controllers is preferred.
- Experience with heavy equipment or off-road platforms in construction, mining, or agriculture is preferred.
- Experience building calibration pipelines or system-identification tooling used across a fleet is preferred.
Benefits
- Full-time employees primarily work from the Applied Intuition office 5 days per week, with occasional remote-work flexibility; this expectation does not apply to contractors.
- Benefits may include health, dental, vision, life and disability insurance, 401(k) retirement benefits with employer match, learning and wellness stipends, and paid time off.
- Eligible roles may include equity in the form of options and/or restricted stock units.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Applied Intuition
Applied Intuition, Inc. is powering the future of physical AI. Founded in 2017 and now valued at $15 billion, the Silicon Valley company is creating the digital infrastructure needed to bring intelligence to every moving machine on the planet. Applied Intuition services the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining and agriculture industries in three core areas: tools and infrastructure, operating systems, and autonomy. Eighteen of the top 20 global automakers, as well as the United States military and its allies, trust the company’s solutions to deliver physical intelligence. Applied Intuition is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Washington, D.C.; San Diego; Ft. Walton Beach, Florida; Ann Arbor, Michigan; London; Stuttgart; Munich; Stockholm; Bangalore; Seoul; and Tokyo. Learn more at applied.co.