Senior Software Engineer, AV Planner

NVIDIA is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, AV Planner to work on state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle technologies. As an AV Planning Engineer, you will develop, maintain, and integrate behavior and motion planning algorithms and software for sophisticated urban driving.

Responsibilities:

• Develop and ship behavior and trajectory planning for an L4 robotaxi (lane changes, merges, intersections, unprotected turns, yielding, stop-and-go, curbside operations).
• Design planning technologies needed to build the AV software stack; write new software modules from scratch that drive vehicles safely and comfortably in dense urban environments.
• Build optimization-, sampling-, and/or search-based planning approaches with vehicle dynamics and constraints (collision avoidance, comfort/jerk limits, road-rule compliance).
• Define and implement fallback and degraded-mode behaviors (e.g., safe stop / minimal risk maneuvers) and contribute to safety-oriented design (failure modes, redundancy, validation evidence).
• Integrate planning with prediction, perception, mapping/localization, and controls; define clean interfaces and troubleshoot end-to-end system issues using logs and scenario replay.
• Build and improve offline and closed-loop simulation benchmarks and metrics for planning quality (safety, legality, comfort, progress), and drive regression prevention.
• Define and build tools to accelerate debugging, scenario triage/mining, evaluation automation, and parameter/config management across vehicle platforms.
• Drive integration efforts across different platforms/vehicle types; support on-vehicle issue reproduction and resolution.

Requirements:

• BS, MS, or higher degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of experience in the relevant field.
• Strong software engineering skills in C/C++ (production-quality, performance-aware, testable code); Python experience for tooling/evaluation is a plus.
• Knowledge and hands-on background in several of the following: motion planning, decision-making, optimization, search, sampling-based planning, geometry, vehicle dynamics/kinematics, real-time systems.
• Experience building and using simulation and evaluation pipelines, writing unit/integration tests, and preventing regressions via automation.
• Strong debugging skills across multi-module systems; ability to turn ambiguous on-road/sim failures into actionable fixes.
• Ability to communicate clearly and collaborate effectively across functions (prediction/perception/controls/safety).

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience shipping urban/L4 robotaxi planning (behavior + trajectory) with measurable improvements in safety and ride quality.
• Experience with interaction-aware or uncertainty-aware planning (risk-sensitive decision making, robust constraints, prediction coupling).
• Experience with automotive safety concepts and analysis methods (e.g., FMEA) and building credible validation strategies.
• Track record of leading architecture/roadmap and mentoring, or rapidly delivering high-quality features with strong engineering fundamentals.
• PhD with relevant experience or significant industry experience in autonomy/robotics.