NVIDIA is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, AV Planner to work on state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle technologies. The successful candidate will develop, maintain, and integrate behaviour and motion planning algorithms and software for sophisticated urban driving.
Job Description: As an AV Planning Engineer, you will work on cutting-edge autonomous vehicle technologies with leaders in AI, deep learning, computer vision, mapping, prediction, and vehicle control. You will be responsible for developing, maintaining, and integrating behaviour and motion planning algorithms and software for sophisticated urban driving.
Key Responsibilities:
- Develop and ship behaviour 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 optimisation-, 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 behaviours (e.g., safe stop / minimal risk manoeuvres) and contribute to safety-oriented design (failure modes, redundancy, validation evidence).
- Integrate planning with prediction, perception, mapping/localisation, 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.
- 12+ 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, optimisation, 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).
Nice to Have:
- Hands-on experience shipping urban/L4 robotaxi planning (behaviour + 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.
You will also be eligible for equity and benefits.
