Senior Motion Planning Engineer - Controls, Trajectory Optimization

On our Motion Planning Controls team, you'll apply your passion in robotics and software development for production-ready autonomous vehicles. In this role you'll perform ground breaking research, conduct design processes, and implement performance-critical algorithms to generate safe, comfortable, and intuitive autonomous vehicle behaviors across Motional’s fleet of robo-taxis.

• Develop state-of-the-art motion control and trajectory optimization formulation to ensure vehicle autonomously navigates safely and smoothly 
• Integrate and evaluate combinations of trajectory optimization and tracking algorithms
• Design and build robust and scalable software that enables rapid exploration and evaluation of different motion planning approaches and algorithms. 
• Collaborate with upstream decision/behavior planning and prediction and downstream motion tracking algorithms.
• Leverage modern development toolchains including testing, simulation, and continuous integration, to enable rapid development cycles. 

• Understand and explain trade-offs, complex concepts to peers and leaders to drive decisions.
• Create project proposals that drive long-term technical roadmap and span multiple sub-systems.
• Provide high quality code and design reviews based on deep understanding of the teams’ services and technologies.
• Mentor junior team members to develop a culture of product focused engineering, research, and development.

• Bachelors, Masters, or PhD degree preferred in Robotics, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• 3+ years of C++ software development 
• Experience with Model Predictive Control (MPC), state estimation, robust control, vehicle dynamics, and simulation environments
• Understanding of numerical optimization algorithms (interior point method, sequential quadratic programming, etc)
• Experience with optimization solvers (IPOPT, Gurobi, etc)
• Past experience owning and leading technical development on features from problem formulation, algorithm design, through implementation
• Knowledge of Python is a bonus