Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Behaviors

The Behaviors Teams at Cruise are responsible for developing machine learning models to enable our AV to drive smoothly and safely around an urban environment. This includes working on a variety of really exciting problems such as:

Building a globally consistent prediction of what all different nearby agents (like other cars, buses, animals, pedestrians) are going to in the next few seconds Generating safe, comfortable and feasible trajectories to navigate dynamic urban environments Scoring and selecting the optimal trajectory, optimizing across many dimensions such as safety, comfort and customer experience.

The Behaviors teams work closely with our Perception partners to get data from a variety of sensors, with rich attributes, simulation data, high-fidelity maps, etc, all of which is necessary to build the above technologies. We also collaborate with Robotics and Controls partners to enable the car to follow the planned path accurately.

The Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer is a versatile role in Behaviors that drives a wide spectrum of applied ML research and development to overcome challenges on urban roads.

What you'll be doing:

• From a research perspective, exploring, prototyping, validating, and iterating new algorithms

• On the development side, driving efforts to optimize, supervise and refine on-road performance for models on the path to production

• Considered one of the technical leaders of the department who guides current and future technology choices

• Have a deep understanding of the business and operational impact for different technology tradeoffs, and able to balance effectively based on company's need

• Enable others engineers on the team to be more effective through design and code that is easy to extend and contribute into

• Capable of influencing others and building consensus even over contentious technical debates

• Ensure better engineering best practices are adopted and followed and the quality of the product offerings are at a high bar

• Drive long-term planning and establish scalable processes for execution.

• Work with teams across Cruise to foster a collaborative culture of testing, safety, and documentation

• Pursue transformative technologies that enable us to scale and bend the cost curve while driving significant change for engineering productivity

• Serve as an embodiment of our values

• Help define, build, and embody Cruise engineering culture and principles

• Embody Cruise behaviors: Stay Safe, Own It, Stay Focused, Seek Truth, Work Together, Be Humble

What you must have:

• BS, MS, or PhD, in CS/CE/EE, or equivalent industry experience

• Experience in SOTA deep learning techniques, e.g. training LLM/ foundational models and/or other large foundational models

• Extensive experience with ML frameworks such as Tensorflow, Caffe, and PyTorch

• Extensive experience with machine learning and classification

• Strong programming skills in Python or C++

• Excellent mathematical reasoning skills, especially with probability

• Passionate about self driving car technology and its impact on the world

• Attention to detail and a passion for truth

• A track record of efficiently solving complex problems collaboratively on larger teams

• Startup mentality - openness to dealing with unknown unknowns and wearing many hats

• Strong expertise in writing production quality code and setting standards for code quality across engineering teams

• Experience in driving technical strategy and vision for engineering teams and organizations

• Leadership experience for planning and execution of cross-functional initiatives and projects

Bonus points!

• PhD in machine learning or computer science

• Experience with ROS, OpenCV, Gazebo, or PCL

• Experience with CUDA

• Track record in deploying prediction models into real world environments

• Experience with autonomous driving technologies

The salary range for this position is $217,600 - $320,000. Compensation will vary depending on location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. You may also be offered a bonus, long-term incentives, and benefits. These ranges are subject to change.