Director, Autonomy Perception

May Mobility; United States; On-site; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

May Mobility seeks a Director of Perception to lead the vision, strategy, and technical roadmap of the Autonomy Perception team. This pivotal role sits at the intersection of autonomous driving technology and transformative mobility, reporting to the Vice President of Autonomy.

You will mentor engineering managers and engineers, drive advances in sensor processing, multi-sensor fusion, and behavior prediction, and align the roadmap with broader company priorities and city-scale deployments.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering experience.
• PhD or masters in robotics, CS, or related field.
• Proven ability to lead large engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership to the Autonomy Perception team.
• Develop and maintain the roadmap for autonomy perception.
• Collaborate with Vehicle Engineering, Product, and Operations to deploy solutions.
• Deliver advances in perception tech including detection, tracking, and prediction.
• Lead hiring and grow a diverse, high-performing team.

Skills

Leadership

Technical leadership

Strategic thinking

Communication

Problem solving

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

PhD or master's degree in a relevant field

Tools

MPDM knowledge

Job description

The Director of Perception will be responsible for leading the vision, strategy, and technical roadmap of the Autonomy Perception team at May Mobility. The Director of Perception plays a key role in advancing May’s core autonomy software stack, ensuring that May’s unique, innovative MPDM architecture operates on high quality data from sensors and sensor processing algorithms.

This is a unique opportunity to sit at the crossroads of cutting-edge autonomous driving technology, transformative mobility, and the products that enable change in the transportation landscape of cities today.

This position reports to the Vice President of Autonomy and is responsible for providing world class leadership to our autonomy engineering managers and engineers, in order to propel their professional success as they develop industry-leading technology advancements.

• Be a technical thought leader to champion May Mobility’s mission, vision, values and company priorities to develop and execute autonomy strategy with fellow executives and engineering leaders.
• Work cross-functionally with Vehicle Engineering, Product, and Operations leaders to solve and deploy solutions to autonomy perception challenges.
• Deliver innovative and robust advances to May’s perception technology including measurable improvements to object detection, classification, tracking, and prediction.
• Ensure May’s core perception technologies operate efficiently and effectively in commercial deployments, including supporting effective triage and resolution of issues related to this technology.
• Maintain an understanding of related research fields including machine learning, end-to-end learned systems, tracking systems, multi-sensor fusion, and behavior prediction.
• Lead design and specification of next-generation sensor suites to maximize May’s perception system performance and optimize cost. Work with systems and hardware teams to support prototyping and evaluating future systems.
• Develop and maintain key performance indicators (KPIs) to track autonomy performance
• Identify key gaps and challenges in May’s autonomy perception technology.
• Construct and execute a roadmap to solve key challenges and work with other autonomy leaders to synchronize this roadmap with the roadmaps of other functions.
• Identify monthly, quarterly and yearly milestones to iteratively improve performance in both the short and long term.
• Take responsibility for the overall planning, execution, and success of complex technical projects and provide the team with technical leadership.
• Help set perception team hiring targets. Interview, hire, and manage a diverse team of talented perception engineers and scientists.
• Oversee the escalation of critical issues and opportunities within the autonomy team’s leadership, driving clear recommendations to maximize the effectiveness of the team with respect to company priorities and strategy.

Skills and Abilities

Success in this role typically requires the following competencies:

• Deep technical knowledge and demonstrated success in delivering innovative solutions in one or more of the fields of multi-sensor fusion, object detection, scene segmentation, tracking, and behavior prediction.
• A demonstrated strong attention to detail with the ability to understand, track, and efficiently mitigate technical, integration, and personnel risks.
• Demonstrated success in working in uncertain work environments with an ability to turn concepts and problems that are uncertain into effective, executable plans to resolve these issues.
• A proven ability to get the best out of others, set goals and expectations for others, communicate clearly and honestly, and discuss difficult topics.
• An ability to clearly and concisely communicate technical concepts including root cause analysis, technical challenges and their solutions, and results backed by data.
• Proven ability to work with other peers in related technical areas to jointly solve larger system issues.
• Proven ability to deliver under tight schedules.

Qualifications and Experience

Candidates most successful in this role typically hold the following qualifications or comparable knowledge or experience:

Required

• 10+ years of engineering experience
• PhD or masters degree in a relevant, highly technical field (e.g. robotics, computer science, computer engineering, aerospace engineering, physics)
• A demonstrated ability to solve complex autonomy problems as a principal investigator, staff or principal engineer, or director (or equivalent role)
• 7+ years of software-focused engineering experience solving challenging robotics problems in mission critical software and/or robotic systems.
• Experience leading a team of 10+ engineers - setting goals, leading by example, handling challenging situations and failures
• Previous experience as individual contributor successfully developing and deploying innovative solutions in the autonomous vehicle or related space
• 5+ years of management experience
• Experience developing and/or using MPDM
• Previous experience growing a team, crafting hiring plans, designing and conducting interviews, reviewing candidates, and making hiring decisions
• Deep understanding of the challenges facing autonomous vehicles as well as the state of the art in autonomy.
• Previous startup experience

Physical Requirements

• Standard office working conditions which includes but is not limited to: