As a Staff Platform Engineer, you will lead the evolution of the core software platform powering autonomous ground vehicles. Your primary responsibility is to establish the long-term technical vision, ensuring the system scales reliably with increasing fleet size, sensor complexity, and autonomy capabilities.
Key Responsibilities
- Define the multi-year platform roadmap, guiding architectural decisions for real-time performance, safety, and maintainability.
- Own the design and evolution of Linux-based operating environments, including custom Ubuntu and Yocto distributions tailored for safety-critical workloads.
- Make strategic build-versus-buy decisions and lead the selection and configuration of ROS 2 middleware, including Cyclone DDS, Fast DDS, and Zenoh.
- Establish quality-of-service policies, inter-process communication profiles, and determinism requirements for high-bandwidth sensor data pipelines.
- Lead the development of user-space drivers for LiDAR, cameras, radar, GNSS/INS, and vehicle network interfaces such as CAN.
- Set hardware integration standards to ensure consistency and reliability when onboarding new sensors or components.
- Own the platform’s functional safety and security strategy, including secure boot, over-the-air updates, and vulnerability response processes.
- Ensure alignment with ISO 26262 and SOTIF as the system matures toward production readiness.
- Define observability standards and SLIs/SLOs that provide clear health signals in both lab and field environments.
- Collaborate with autonomy, perception, and controls teams to establish cross-stack performance budgets for CPU, GPU, memory, and latency.
- Drive initiatives to meet performance targets across teams and resolve systemic bottlenecks.
- Define CI/CD pipelines for OS images and driver packages, including hardware-in-the-loop testing and rollback mechanisms.
- Contribute to hiring, interview rubric development, and mentorship of senior engineers, helping grow future tech leads.
- Elevate code and design review practices across the platform organization.
- Represent the company in technical discussions with silicon, sensor, and middleware vendors, influencing their roadmaps to meet platform needs.
- Provide escalation support during field trials and use operational insights to drive platform improvements.
- Identify and reduce strategic technical debt across the software stack.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of experience building Linux-based embedded or robotics platforms.
- Proven track record of building a platform from inception through at least one order-of-magnitude scale in fleet size within a robotics or autonomous vehicle environment.
- Experience leading technical alignment across autonomy, perception, and hardware teams without direct authority.
- Strong leadership in raising engineering standards, including design and code reviews, on-call practices, and post-mortems.
- Expert-level proficiency in C++ (C++17 or later) and Python, with clear judgment on language use in real-time contexts.
- Hands-on experience shipping real-time, safety-critical systems in domains such as avionics, ADAS, or autonomous vehicles.
- Deep knowledge of IPC mechanisms and middleware on POSIX-compliant systems.
- Advanced skills in performance analysis using tools like perf, eBPF, ftrace, and LTTng.
- Experience with Git, Docker/OCI containers, and CI/CD workflows for signed OS artifacts.
- Familiarity with sensor vehicle buses including USB, Ethernet/TSN, CAN, PCIe, SPI, and I2C.
- Experience with functional safety standards such as ISO 26262, MISRA, or SOTIF, or a clear path to owning this work.
- Hands-on experience with Nvidia Orin and Thor platforms and heterogeneous compute scheduling.
Preferred Qualifications
- Prior work on autonomous vehicles, drones, or safety-critical robotic systems.
- Experience configuring ptp4l and Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) in multi-sensor environments.
- Working knowledge of v4l2 and gstreamer frameworks.
- Familiarity with QNX or other real-time operating systems and judgment on when to use them over Linux.
- Deep understanding of Yocto and Linux internals, including package management, systemd, networking, and real-time kernel patches like PREEMPT_RT.
- Knowledge of GPU acceleration technologies such as CUDA and Vulkan.
- Contributions to open-source projects in Linux, ROS 2, DDS, or Yocto, or public technical work such as talks, papers, or standards participation.
- Ability to thrive in a fast-paced startup environment and support deployments in industrial settings like airports.
