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Senior Software Engineer, Onboard Autonomy

Nuro· Autonomy
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Mountain View, California$193.9k - $291.2kPosted 7mo ago

About the role

Autonomy Engineer focused on onboard autonomy, developing software that runs on vehicle embedded computers to make real-time decisions using onboard sensors and compute. Build and ship reliable autonomy features under strict latency, compute, and safety constraints in real-world deployments.

Responsibilities

  • Develop, integrate, and deploy onboard autonomy behaviors (e.g., navigation, obstacle avoidance, lane/route following, docking, interaction behaviors)
  • Implement and maintain real-time decision-making components: behavior planning, state machines/behavior trees, local planning, and control interfaces
  • Build robust sensor-driven autonomy pipelines on-device (camera, lidar, radar, IMU, wheel odometry, GNSS), including synchronization, calibration hooks, and fault handling
  • Optimize autonomy performance for latency, CPU/GPU usage, memory, and power on embedded compute (e.g., NVIDIA Jetson, x86 edge boxes, custom ECUs)
  • Design and implement safety and fallback strategies: health monitoring, degraded modes, watchdogs, safe-stop, and redundancy-aware logic
  • Own the autonomy stack’s on-robot integration: bring-up, debugging, profiling, logging, and release validation on real hardware
  • Improve onboard observability: structured logs, traces, metrics, event recording, and tools to support incident review and rapid iteration
  • Collaborate with perception, mapping/localization, controls, hardware, and systems teams to define clear interfaces and ship end-to-end features
  • Participate in field testing and root-cause analysis of autonomy issues seen in real deployments

Qualifications

  • Strong software engineering skills in C++ and/or Rust (Python acceptable as a supporting language)
  • Experience shipping software that runs on-device with real-world constraints (embedded Linux, real-time-ish systems, performance-sensitive code)
  • Understanding of autonomy fundamentals: planning, state estimation/localization, controls, and how they interface (you don’t need to be an expert in all)
  • Experience with robotics middleware and tooling (commonly ROS/ROS 2, custom pub/sub frameworks, gRPC, DDS, etc.)
  • Proficiency with debugging and performance tools (e.g., gdb/lldb, perf, flamegraphs, profiling GPU workloads, log/trace analysis)
  • Strong testing discipline: unit/integration tests, simulation/HIL concepts, and safe rollout practices for autonomy

Skills

Required:C++Embedded LinuxReal-time / performance-sensitive codingROS/ROS 2
Nice to have:RustPython
Last updated Jul 8, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Nuro

Autonomy for all. All roads, all rides.

Driving the future of autonomy with the most scalable AI driver.

AutonomyAI driverDelivery robotsRobotaxiAutonomous vehicles
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