Software Engineer (Robotics)

Location: Foster City, CA

Duration: ~6 months

Hourly Pay Rate: up to $91.72/HR W2

Software Engineer - Motion Planning

Onsite in Foster City, CA | at least 3 days in office

Summary:

Software Engineer - Motion Planning is dedicated to improving the driving behaviors of the robot on public roads. The Planner's job is to figure out where the robot is going and how to get there safely in situations as complex as those found in Downtown San Francisco or on the Las Vegas Strip.

This is a cutting-edge problem, which requires teamwork and collaboration across a broad set of experts spanning Planner, Perception, Prediction, Operations, and more. Together, you will create the next generation of algorithmic improvements to expand our robot’s ability to drive in some of the most complex situations found on public roads.

Safety is foundational so you will take a measured approach – develop a principled modification to the Planner, test in simulation and on closed courses, and team up with our safety drivers for on-road testing. 

In this role, you will:

• Implement, debug, and test features and modifications to specific areas of driving behavior in our production code base.

• Work closely with senior engineers to understand design specifications and deliver reliable, high-quality code.

• Utilize our extensive backend tooling to run regression tests and validate your changes across various driving situations.

• Participate in on-vehicle drive reviews, helping to collect data and generate actionable feedback on driving performance.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related technical field.

• 0–5 years of professional experience in software development.

• Strong proficiency in C++.

• Familiarity with foundational concepts of motion planning and pathfinding techniques (e.g., A*, RRTs, PRMs).

• Experience with large-scale codebases, version control (e.g., Git), and software development workflows.

• Eagerness to learn and debug complex, real-time systems.

Bonus Qualifications:

• Coursework or project experience in geometric and/or sampling-based planning algorithms.

• Experience with autonomous robots, simulation environments, or machine learning/data-driven development processes.

Experience with ROS, pose estimation, SLAM, probabilistic filtering, or CUDA