Technical Lead (Vehicle Controls)

Applied Intuition; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Applied Intuition in Sunnyvale, CA seeks a technical lead for controls to own the technical direction of our controls stack across its full lifecycle, from 0→1 development on new vehicle platforms to hardening, calibrating, and scaling controllers across production fleets.

You will mentor the controls team, set priorities, and raise the technical bar through design reviews and collaboration. Expect to drive advanced control methods and field deployments.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience building production software using modern software practices.
• Experience leading engineers or owning a technical area.
• Hands-on with controls solutions from prototype to deployment on real vehicles.
• Fluency in differential equations, numerical optimization, numerical analysis, and physics.
• Experience in safe, high-performance software for production-grade vehicles.
• Ability to mentor engineers and drive cross-stream priorities.
• Experience applying academic research to practical control solutions.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction of the controls stack across its full lifecycle.
• Lead, mentor, and grow the controls team and set priorities.
• Design and implement controllers from low-level to high-level trajectory tracking.
• Develop safe, redundant control systems for safety-critical environments.
• Characterize customer vehicle dynamics to tailor controls solutions.
• Build calibration workflows to scale from prototype to fleets.
• Collaborate with customers' engineers during field deployments.
• Apply nonlinear MPC and MPPI techniques to control problems.

Skills

Technical leadership

Controls engineering

C++

Mathematical optimization

Mentoring

System calibration

MPC/MPPI

Field deployments

Vehicle dynamics

Education

MSc or PhD in mechanical engineering, robotics, or computer science

Job description

• As a technical lead for controls, you will own the technical direction of our controls stack across its full lifecycle — from 0→1 development on new vehicle platforms to hardening, calibrating, and scaling controllers across production fleets
• The systems you lead are high performance and safety-critical, operating under tight timing constraints on real machines in the field
• This role spans the full controls stack: low-level actuation and vehicle characterization on one end, and high-level trajectory tracking — both lateral and longitudinal
• We work on a variety of different vehicle platforms: haul trucks, excavators, wheel loaders, dozers, and other heavy equipment across construction, mining, and agriculture
• In addition to your technical leadership, you will mentor and grow the existing controls team, set priorities across competing work streams, and set the standard for best practices. We move fast and we focus on excellence, for our products and for our business
• Set the technical direction for the controls stack across both 0→1 platform bring-up and production programs, and see designs through from prototype to deployed fleet
• Design and implement controllers at every level of the stack, from low-level actuator control to lateral and longitudinal trajectory tracking
• Design safe, redundant control systems that live within a safety-critical environment
• Characterize the dynamics of customer vehicles across many embodiments — haul trucks, excavators, wheel loaders, dozers, and more — to create tailored controls solutions and close the gap between simulation and real-world behavior
• Build calibration and vehicle characterization workflows that scale controls performance from a single prototype to fleets of vehicles without per-vehicle hand-tuning
• Lead, mentor, and grow the existing controls team; set priorities, unblock engineers, and raise the technical bar through design reviews and hands-on collaboration
• Evaluate and apply academic research to create optimal-control-based solutions using techniques like nonlinear MPC and MPPI control
• Collaborate with customers’ engineers in construction, mining, and agriculture, and manage those relationships through field deployments

If you are hands-on and looking for a place to have a multiplying effect on making autonomous systems a reality, Applied Intuition is the place for you! 6+ years of experience building production software using modern software practices, including experience leading engineers or owning a technical area MSc or PhD in mechanical engineering, robotics, or computer science with coursework or research experience in controls Fluency in differential equations, numerical optimization, numerical analysis, and physics Hands-on experience taking controls solutions from first prototype through deployment on real, production-grade vehicles Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, prioritize a team’s roadmap, and drive technical decisions across multiple concurrent workstreams Passion for tackling challenging control problems involving a wide array of vehicles in varied and unstructured environments Enthusiasm for coming up with practical solutions to cutting-edge challenges in a fast-paced environment, and for building towards an end-to-end strategy Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles Experience building calibration pipelines or system identification tooling used across a fleet Experience in quadratic programming and nonlinear optimization to create robust and performant controllers Experience with heavy equipment or off-road platforms in construction, mining, or agriculture Experience writing safety-critical, high-performance software using modern C++