Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Perception

🚗 Staff Perception Engineer, Machine Learning📍 San Jose, CA | Hybrid – 3 Days OnsiteThe RoleWe'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.