Real-Time HD Map Estimation Engineer

Decisive Point; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Applied Intuition is hiring for a senior role in the Localization, Calibration, and Mapping team. You will own the live-map estimator end-to-end, fuse HD map priors with live perception, and define interfaces and contracts that other teams rely on.

You will work in a fast-paced environment building a new platform used across autonomous vehicle programs. The role emphasizes state estimation fundamentals, real-time constraints on embedded compute, and a strong focus on evaluation pipelines to

Qualifications

• 5+ years building production software, including at least one shipped system where they owned the estimation core.
• State estimation fundamentals proven in production: factor graphs and/or filtering, data association, uncertainty representation and propagation, and 3D geometry and transforms.
• Experience fusing heterogeneous sources such as prior map data, perception output, and raw sensors, into a single world estimate, with rigorous error characterization.
• Strong modern C++ and the ability to make estimation code meet real-time budgets on embedded compute.
• Rigorous evaluation practice: has built ground-truth or metrics pipelines and used them to hold a shipped operating point and prevent regressions.
• Judgment about uncertainty: understands the difference between an error that degrades gracefully and one that is catastrophic, and designs the system accordingly.
• Experience defining a system and its interfaces and negotiating those contracts with consumer teams.

Responsibilities

• Own the onboard live-map estimator end to end: fuse HD map priors with live perception into a single, real-time estimate of the world the rest of the stack can trust.
• Build our onboard map change detection: classify situations like boundary shifts, stop-line moves, and road closures from the divergence between map and perception, and define when the planner should stop trusting the map.
• Define the map trust contracts the planner builds against: confidence semantics, degraded-mode behavior, and the operating points that hold across vehicle programs.
• Build the evaluation backbone, ground-truth and metrics pipelines, operating points, and regression testing that keep estimator and detector quality from silently drifting.
• Ship estimation code in modern C++ that meets real-time budgets on embedded compute.
• Extend the loop offboard over time: aggregate divergence detections across fleet drive logs into map freshness and correction pipelines.

Skills

Production software

Estimation core

State estimation

C++

Real-time embedded

Map data fusion

System interfaces

Evaluation pipelines

Tools

GTSAM

Job description

Applied Intuition is hiring for a senior role in the Localization, Calibration, and Mapping team. You will own the live-map estimator end-to-end, fuse HD map priors with live perception, and define interfaces and contracts that other teams rely on.

You will work in a fast-paced environment building a new platform used across autonomous vehicle programs. The role emphasizes state estimation fundamentals, real-time constraints on embedded compute, and a strong focus on evaluation pipelines to