Principal AI/ML Engineer - State Estimation & Map Creation, Embodied AI

Hybrid: This role is categorized as hybrid. This means the successful candidate is expected to report three times per week, at minimum, to at least one of our Bay Area offices (San Francisco, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale). 

Role: As a Technical Lead in State Estimation within the SEAM Embodied AI organization, you will be a senior individual contributor driving cutting-edge state estimation solutions that directly impact autonomous driving performance. Your role is pivotal in designing, architecting, and deploying advanced systems for purposes including estimation of vehicle ego-motion, pinpointing the vehicle’s location in the world, and calibrating parameters of all sensors to ensure they optimally support many other vehicle subsystems. You'll lead critical technical initiatives, collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, mentor engineers across the organization, and significantly shape the future of onboard autonomous driving capabilities.  

About the Organization: The SEAM Embodied AI team is at the forefront of developing groundbreaking sensor fusion systems powering fully autonomous vehicles. We leverage modern approaches that are both practical and theoretically sound, supported with top quality code and rigorous testing. Our solutions enable robust state estimation for the purposes of real-time localization, static and dynamic sensor alignment/calibration, as well as onboard and offboard high-fidelity map creation at scale. Join a collaborative and innovative team redefining autonomy through state-of-the-art methodology, delivering solutions that move beyond current technological boundaries.  

What You'll Do:  

• Drive the design, development, and deployment of advanced state estimation systems, delivering solutions for localization, sensor alignment, and more.  

• Lead and architect complex projects, from conception through validation to onboard implementation, emphasizing scalability, robustness, and safety-critical operation.  

• Champion innovation in state estimation architectures, mathematical formulations, and fault tolerance strategies suited for real-time onboard deployment.  

• Provide technical mentorship and thought leadership, elevating engineering practices, and fostering innovation across teams.  

• Collaborate closely with multidisciplinary engineering groups, ensuring seamless integration of localization, sensor alignment, and other capabilities into autonomous vehicle systems.  

• Influence technical roadmaps, shaping strategic priorities aligned with company objectives and product milestones.  

Your Skills & Abilities:  

• Master's or Ph.D. in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.  

• 8-10+ years of extensive experience developing and deploying advanced state estimation systems, particularly in real-time onboard applications.  

• Proven track record as a technical leader and expert in state estimation, localization, and/or sensor alignment, operating on a wide variety of sensor inputs to perform robustly within safety-critical systems.  

• Deep expertise in modern state estimation techniques, including state-of-the-art filtering architectures, optimization methods, SLAM approaches, fault detection and exclusion techniques, mathematical underpinnings, and robustness under uncertainty.  

• Strong software engineering proficiency, particularly in C++ and Python, alongside extensive hands-on experience with development, integration, and testing tools. 

• Excellent communication, collaboration, and mentoring abilities, comfortable influencing technical strategy and guiding engineering excellence across the organization.  

• Bonus: AV/ADAS experience is a big plus