Senior Software Engineer - Planning

The role

You will design and ship deterministic, safety-critical planning systems for autonomous vehicles. The role focuses on classical motion planning, predictable behavior, and large-scale evaluation.

What you will do

• Design and implement classical or ML motion planners for fallback and minimal-risk maneuvers.
• Build planners that operate reliably under degraded perception, partial observability, and system faults.
• Define and execute safe, deterministic vehicle motions such as controlled slow-downs, pull-overs, and safe stops.
• Use large-scale simulation and real-world data to evaluate planner behavior and guide parameter tuning.
• Develop metrics, analysis tools, and dashboards to understand planner performance at scale.
• Collaborate closely with behavior prediction, perception, controls, safety, and remote assistance teams.
• Contribute to a reusable fallback platform used across trucking and other autonomy programs.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in motion planning for autonomous vehicles or robotics.
• Strong foundation in robotic motion planning algorithms and trajectory generation (optimization-, search-, or rule-based).
• Experience building deterministic, safety-critical planning systems.
• A data-driven mindset for large-scale evaluation, debugging, and tuning of planning behavior.
• Proficiency in C++ and experience working in real-time systems.
• Strong systems thinking and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Nice to have

• Experience designing minimal-risk maneuvers (MRM) or emergency handling behaviors.
• Familiarity with AV safety concepts, ODD constraints, or safety-case-driven development.
• Experience using ML techniques for parameter tuning, calibration, or offline optimization.
• Experience working with degraded sensors, uncertainty, or human-in-the-loop systems.
• Background in simulation frameworks or large-scale log analysis.

About the company

Applied Intuition, Inc. is a Silicon Valley company creating digital infrastructure for physical AI. It services the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining and agriculture industries.