Lead Autonomy Engineer - Field Robotics & Perception

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation bonus up to $15K

Unlimited PTO

Health insurance

Meal stipend $1K/month

Job summary

TAR builds autonomous robotics for industrial solar racking systems, combining hardware and software engineering to deploy at gigawatt scale.

As Lead Autonomy Engineer, you will own a core portion of the autonomy stack from development to field deployment, guiding a small team of engineers and coordinating with hardware teams to ensure robust performance on live construction sites in challenging environments.

Qualifications

• 5-7 years of software engineering experience including leading a small team or technical lead on a project.
• Hands-on experience owning software or autonomy for a robotics system through deployment
• Experience writing realtime, safety-critical software with limited compute
• Expertise in perception, navigation, planning, or controls for autonomous systems
• Ability to review others' work and communicate design trade-offs to management and partners

Responsibilities

• Own the technical design and delivery plan for a defined area of the autonomy stack (perception, planning, or controls)
• Lead day-to-day technical direction for a small team of autonomy engineers and mentor junior staff
• Drive area from early development through field deployment with real-world validation
• Make architecture/design decisions co-developed with hardware engineers for robotics systems
• Own development lifecycle for area: roadmap input, prioritization, release, monitoring, iteration
• Spend 1-3 weeks per year at the West Texas site to connect field performance with software fixes
• Partner with VP of Autonomy on hiring and roadmap decisions

Skills

Software engineering

Technical leadership

Robotics autonomy

Realtime safety-critical

Autonomy stack knowledge

Code review

Job description

TAR builds autonomous robotics for industrial solar racking systems, combining hardware and software engineering to deploy at gigawatt scale.

As Lead Autonomy Engineer, you will own a core portion of the autonomy stack from development to field deployment, guiding a small team of engineers and coordinating with hardware teams to ensure robust performance on live construction sites in challenging environments.