Senior Software Engineer (Trajectory Planning)

Oxa Autonomy; Oxford; Hybrid; GBP 55,000 - 85,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading company in autonomous vehicles is seeking a Senior Software Engineer specializing in Trajectory Planning. This role focuses on designing and implementing algorithms to ensure the vehicle's behavior adheres to traffic laws while collaborating with various teams to ensure seamless operations. Candidates should have strong backgrounds in trajectory planning and C++ development, with opportunities for career growth and flexible work arrangements.

Benefits

Competitive salary

Company share programme

Flexible work arrangements

£3,000 flexible benefits

Salary exchange pension plan

25 days annual leave plus bank holidays

Pet-friendly office environment

Safe assigned spaces for diverse needs

Qualifications

• PhD with 2+ years or MS with 4+ years of professional experience.
• Extensive hands-on experience of optimisation-based trajectory planning.
• Experience with technical and people leadership.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, test, and deploy algorithms for trajectory planning.
• Collaborate with teams for smooth maneuver execution across environments.
• Document and train others on teamwork outputs and features.

Skills

Optimisation-based trajectory planning

Sampling-based trajectory planning

Modern C++ algorithm development

Dynamic Programming

Model Predictive Control (MPC)

iLQR

RRT

Vehicle dynamics and modelling

Customer-centric outlook

Education

PhD in Mech Eng, Aerospace, Comp Science, Robotics, Mechatronics

MS in Mech Eng, Aerospace, Comp Science, Robotics, Mechatronics

Job description

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Senior Software Engineer (Trajectory Planning), Oxford

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Client:

Location:

Oxford, United Kingdom

Job Category:

Other

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EU work permit required:

Yes

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Job Reference:

130d21e9f954

Job Views:

5

Posted:

29.06.2025

Expiry Date:

13.08.2025

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Job Description:

Your Role

As a Senior Software Engineer in Trajectory Planning, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, testing, and deploying algorithms that realise the desired behaviours that the AV needs to exhibit in any particular scenario. Specifically, this role will focus on planning the spatio-temporal trajectories that manifest the desired actions that the AV is executing in the presence of other actors while obeying traffic rules. You will work closely with Decision Making and Controls to plan and execute manoeuvres in a smooth, comfortable, and precise manner.

In this role, you will:

• Collaborate with your Team Lead and team members to solve Spatio-Temporal motion planning problems, including off-the-shelf solver evaluation and custom solver implementation.
• Collaborate with the Decision Making team to transcribe nuanced manoeuvres in complex on- and off-road environments into generalised Trajectory Planning problems.
• Collaborate with the Controls team to ensure Smooth, Comfortable, Precise manoeuvre execution for on- and off-road applications.
• Contribute to the development of high quality functionality and APIs that allow the Planner functionality to be used as a building block for on-vehicle capabilities.
• Create appropriate metrics and tools to measure and benchmark the performance of Planners deployed on various AV platforms.
• Work with customers, stakeholders, and peers to ensure the right solutions are delivered, and actively contribute to resolving disagreements through constructive dialog.
• Contribute significantly to the engineering lifecycle, including scoping, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance of your team's work.
• Influence technical strategy within the Planning Team, ensuring alignment with your Team Lead and your counterparts in other teams.
• Document and train others on your team's work, focus on improving features, and understand the business and customer value of your team's work.
• Positively impact product quality, customer experience, and maintainability, and take on projects that improve team processes and solutions.
• Contribute to hiring and onboarding at scale by defining role responsibilities and requirements, leading interviews, engaging in recruiting outreach for your team, and mentoring and developing new team members.

Requirements

What you need to succeed:

• PhD in related field (Mech Eng, Aerospace, Comp Science, Robotics, Mechatronics) with 2+ years of professional experience is desired
• MS in related field (Mech Eng, Aerospace, Comp Science, Robotics, Mechatronics) with 4+ years of professional experience is acceptable
• Extensive hands-on experience of optimisation-based trajectory planning
• Experience with sampling-based trajectory planning approaches
• Experience with trajectory planning problem formulation and problem transcription
• Modern C++ algorithm development and deployment, ideally in a production environment (including STL and common testing frameworks)
• Experience with technical and people leadership / management experience
• Dynamic Programming experience
• Knowledge of model Predictive Control, MPC (algorithm)
• Experience with iLQR (algorithm,implementation / utilisation)
• Experience with RRT (algorithm)
• Experience with vehicle dynamics and modelling
• Proven agility in fast-changing environments. As a scale-up, we’re constantly evolving so our people need to evolve too for us to succeed together.
• A customer-centric outlook. Chances are you won’t be directly customer facing, but we value people who anticipate and prioritise the needs of our customers. We call it ‘inventing on their behalf’.

The Candidate Journey: Multi-Step and Two-Way

No-one wants to feel like a square peg in a round hole, so this process is designed to give you every chance to get the measure of us, and us of you. The various stages give you every opportunity to show your unique strengths and qualities, and enables each of us to establish if we’re a good fit for the other. There will be a live C++ coding assessment as part of the interview process. If the fit is good and you’re selected, you’re then in a position to do great work and thrive, which is what everyone wants.

We provide:

• Competitive salary, benchmarked against the market and reviewed annually
• Company share programme
• Hybrid and/or flexible work arrangements
• An outstanding £3,000 flexible benefits including private medical insurance, critical illness coverage, life assurance, EAP, group income protection
• A salary exchange pension plan
• 25 days’ annual leave plus bank holidays
• A pet-friendly office environment
• Safe assigned spaces for team members with individual and diverse needs