Autonomy Engineer — Planning & Orchestration

Tera AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Tera AI, based in San Francisco and San Diego, is advancing a new type of spatial AI for autonomy, operating onsite in the field. Our team blends AI pioneers from leading labs and space programs and focuses on exploring unexplored autonomy use cases in vehicles and robots.

We value leaders who have shipped planning or behaviour layers for real robots, with explicit, inspectable architectures. Candidates should be strong C++/Python programmers and capable of supervising multiple vehicles without

Qualifications

• Shipped planning or behaviour layer on real robots
• Architectures using behaviour trees or state machines
• Handling failures during comms/localisation/power loss in tasks
• Supervising multiple vehicles without babysitting
• Proficient in C++ and Python
• Experience with multi-agent coordination in contested or comms-denied environments

Skills

Planning

Behaviour trees

State machines

Task allocation

Programming

Multi-agent coordination

Job description

We are a well capitalized stealth VC-backed startup building a new type of spatial AI capable of universally solving autonomy. We innovate at the foundational layer of AI by training our own AI models.

Our team

Our team is composed of AI pioneers and leaders from Google X, Google Brain, and Space Agencies. Several of us are repeat founders, with deep commercialization insights across multiple enterprise segments. We enjoy long, deep ideations around entirely unexplored AI use cases in autonomy (cars, drones, robots).

Location

San Francisco and San Diego (onsite). Active Field Testing

Technical Skills

• Planning: You have shipped a planning or behaviour layer on real robots that operated without close supervision.
• Architecture: Behaviour trees, state machines, task allocation, or equivalent. Explicit and inspectable rather than emergent.
• Failure Handling: What happens on loss of comms, localisation or power mid-task, designed rather than discovered.
• Operator Interface: Supervising several vehicles without babysitting any of them.
• Programming: Strong C++ and Python.
• Domain-Specific: Multi-agent coordination, contested or comms-denied operation, human-robot supervisory control.