Software Engineer - Autonomy

Applied Intuition, Inc. is powering the future of physical AI. Founded in 2017 and now valued at $15 billion, the Silicon Valley company is creating the digital infrastructure needed to bring intelligence to every moving machine on the planet. Applied Intuition services the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining and agriculture industries in three core areas: tools and infrastructure, operating systems, and autonomy. Eighteen of the top 20 global automakers, as well as the United States military and its allies, trust the company’s solutions to deliver physical intelligence. Applied Intuition is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Washington, D.C.; San Diego; Ft. Walton Beach, Florida; Ann Arbor, Michigan; London; Stuttgart; Munich; Stockholm; Bangalore; Seoul; and Tokyo. Learn more at applied.co .

We are an in-office company, and our expectation is that full-time employees primarily work from their Applied Intuition office 5 days a week. However, we also recognize the importance of flexibility and trust our employees to manage their schedules responsibly. This may include occasional remote work, starting the day with morning meetings from home before heading to the office, or leaving earlier when needed to accommodate family commitments. This in-office expectation does not apply to contractor positions

About the role
As a Software Engineer on the Autonomy team, you will be at the heart of our autonomy stack. We are building the software stack that drives multi-ton trucks autonomously on highways. As an Onboard Software Engineer, you will own the real-time systems that run directly on the vehicle compute platform - from sensor data ingestion and perception pipelines to motion planning execution and safety arbitration. Your code ships on trucks, not just in simulation.

This is a deeply cross-functional role. You will collaborate daily with autonomy domain experts, hardware engineers, safety leads, and validation teams to turn algorithms into production-grade software that operates safely and reliably at highway speeds.


At Applied Intuition, you will:

• Design, implement, and optimize real-time onboard software modules including perception, sensor fusion, path planning execution, vehicle control, and safety monitoring.

• Maintain and improve the middleware layer connecting sensor hardware (lidar, radar, cameras, GPS/IMU) to autonomy algorithm consumers.

• Own latency and throughput performance across the onboard compute stack, profiling and tuning for deterministic behavior under resource constraints.

• Implement ASIL-relevant architecture patterns including fault detection, isolation, and recovery mechanisms.

• Build diagnostics, logging, and observability tooling to support post-drive analysis and rapid root-cause investigations.

• Write thorough unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) tests; contribute to CI/CD pipelines for onboard compute targets.

• Collaborate with the autonomy team to productionize research algorithms, translating prototype SW into efficient C++ deployments.

We’re looking for someone who has:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, or a related field.

• 5+ years of professional experience in software development.

• Exceptional proficiency in C++ and experience with modern C++ standards.

• Experience working in a Linux environment.

• Knowledge of data serialization formats (e.g., Protobuf, JSON).

Nice to have:

• Experience with robotics middleware like ROS or DDS.

• Background in AV perception, prediction, or planning systems.

• Familiarity with vehicle data buses (e.g., CAN, Ethernet).

• Experience with multi-threaded and concurrent programming.

• Experience in a startup or fast-paced environment.

Don’t meet every single requirement? If you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.