Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Perception Simulation Realism
Autonomous driving technology company running a fully driverless ride-hail service, Bay Area
| Employer | Autonomous driving technology company running a fully driverless ride-hail service, Bay Area (not named) |
|---|---|
| Location | Mountain View, CA (Bay Area) · On-site |
| Type & level | Full-time · Staff |
| Pay | USD 298k–368k base Source: pay range stated in the source posting |
| Visa path | O-1A fit (senior candidates) |
| Role family | Autonomous Vehicle Perception & Planning Engineer |
About the role
This team builds an offline ground-truth engine that reprocesses logged driving data with large ML models to produce semantic signals more accurate than the real-time onboard software. Those signals underpin simulation and evaluation for every major software release. The role owns the perception ML architecture and technical direction for that engine as it scales.
What you'll do
- Design a modular ML framework that can absorb a growing list of semantic signal requirements, moving from specialized models toward unified foundation-model architectures.
- Set a multi-year roadmap for the quality, coverage and reliability of offline perception signals.
- Lead optimization of model inference and compute efficiency across petabyte-scale datasets, working with backend infrastructure leads.
- Translate simulation and evaluation needs from teams across the company into technical requirements and grow the internal user base.
- Mentor ML perception engineers and drive execution on top-priority perception initiatives.
- Act as the senior technical authority on codebases, evaluation and data pipelines, and model architectures.
Requirements
- Master's or PhD in computer science, machine learning, robotics or a related field (PhD preferred).
- Proven senior technical leadership: setting technical vision, architecting complex ML systems and mentoring senior engineers and research scientists.
- Deep understanding of foundation models (vision-language or multimodal) and perception architectures such as transformers, 3D detection and scene reconstruction, including fine-tuning or inference-time scaling.
- Expert-level Python, NumPy and a deep learning framework (PyTorch or JAX).
- Track record of gathering requirements from varied customers and aligning them into one roadmap.
Nice to have
- Building and scaling distributed systems or data pipelines at petabyte scale.
- 2D and 3D object detection, camera and LiDAR sensor fusion, tracking and offboard ground-truth generation.
- C++ proficiency and production ML deployment experience.
- Strong publication record at top conferences such as CVPR, ICRA or NeurIPS, or leadership in major open-source projects.
Pay & benefits
USD 298k–368k base. The posting mentions a discretionary annual bonus, an equity incentive plan and a company benefits program, subject to eligibility.
Pay source: pay range stated in the source posting. Market data, not an offer from O1DMatch.
Visa path
Senior ML perception engineers often support an O-1A case with published research, citations, conference or reviewing roles, open-source impact, and evidence of a critical role at a distinguished organization. The posting states no citizenship restriction. An employer like this or a U.S. agent can file the petition, and approval depends on the individual evidence.
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