We're Cruise, a self-driving service designed for the cities we love.

We’re building the world’s most advanced, self-driving vehicles to safely connect people to the places, things, and experiences they care about. We believe self-driving vehicles will help save lives, reshape cities, give back time in transit, and restore freedom of movement for many.

Cruisers have the opportunity to grow and develop while learning from leaders at the forefront of their fields. With a culture of internal mobility, there's an opportunity to thrive in a variety of disciplines. This is a place for dreamers and doers to succeed.

If you are looking to play a part in making a positive impact in the world by advancing the revolutionary work of self-driving cars, join us.

[About the Role]

We are looking for a hardworking Senior Technical Program Manager to support the Perception team in San Francisco. Within the AI department, the Perception team works closely with the Prediction team and Robotics department to see and understand the world around our vehicles to enable safe and comfortable navigation. These groups rely heavily on machine learning. Throughout the lifecycle of each machine learning model, skilled ML engineers within the Perception group design, train, and deploy machine learning models into our unique AV system to enable the AV to understand the dynamic environment around it.

As a TPM, you will be leading planning and execution across multiple teams and initiatives within the Perception group to support the research, design, development, and optimization of new machine learning algorithms and AV software. TPMs are responsible for the “when” and the “how” of the program, and hold their teams accountable to deliver on research and engineering projects to achieve business objectives. At Cruise, we believe in managers who remain deeply technical, and understand the challenges their teams are facing, even though they may not be supplying directly to the codebase.

If you're interested in solving some of the most exciting machine learning problems in the industry, let’s chat!

What you’ll be doing:

Planning

• Drives the formulation and review of department roadmaps and objectives on a quarterly and monthly cadence
• Partner with Technical Product Managers to turn requirements and technical specs into achievable implementation roadmaps, including planning timelines and achievements and identifying cross-team dependencies
• Work with Technical Leads on design decisions, and lead our department design reviews to ensure we continue to raise our technical standards
• Work with Engineering Managers to ensure teams tackle a balanced assignment of critical initiatives, iterative improvements, and proactive engineering excellence investments. Support calculation of team capacity vs estimated workload, and ensure the team can deliver on their commitments

Execution and Delivery

• Own communication of team, initiative, and objective statuses to all partners, including senior management and executives
• Be the point of contact for high-visibility multi-functional workstream. Drive all required meetings, supervise and understand progress, and consolidate and disseminate information
• Foresee the effects of projects across multiple teams and be a key person at leading conflicts and dependencies. Call out and coordinate with dependent teams to unblock work
• Lead project risks, flag these early, and address mitigation where applicable to keep key initiatives on track. Shield teams from outside distractions and interferences
• Define the right team and group sprint processes and meetings (planning, execution, retrospectives) alongside Engineering Managers
• Maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of the team, ensuring the appropriate use of scrum process in JIRA
• Define and maintain a reporting structure to supervise in-flight and backlogged work
• Coordinate with product and engineering management to ensure critical metric goals, project goals and acceptance criteria have been met and completed on schedule
• Help publicly celebrate the team’s wins

Support

• Serve as an embodiment of Cruise behaviors: Stay Safe, Own It, Stay Focused, Seek Truth, Work Together, Be Humble
• Help define, build, and embody engineering culture and principles. Work closely with Engineering Managers and other leads on coaching and improving team collaboration and effectiveness
• Support the growth and organization of the team, act as a mentor, and support onboarding and career development
• Invest in recruiting and building the Cruise engineering brand, conduct technical interviews, and help raise our hiring bar
• Build strong cross team collaborations with the AV Robotics, Data Science, Ground Truth Engineering, and Machine Learning Platform teams.

What you must have:

• Bachelors, Masters, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or similar technical field
• 6+ years of technical tried experience, including as a technical leader or manager
• Experience deploying algorithms and models into real world environments
• Experience leading sophisticated fast-paced initiatives spanning multiple teams and organizations, often with conflicting priorities and schedules
• Self motivation and passion to lead your teams, encourage the best methodologies, and constantly improve
• Proficient with Agile testing methodologies and best practices
• Passionate about self-driving car technology and its impact on the world
• Education and/or equivalent years of experience (must have education listed for US immigration work visa eligibility assessment)

Bonus points!

• Experience working with computer vision algorithms and models such as sensor fusion, multi-object tracking, object detection and recognition, semantic and instance segmentation, and human pose and gesture recognition based on a variety of sensor modalities including lidar, camera and radar
• Experience with popular machine learning algorithms and frameworks such as Tensorflow and PyTorch. Technical experience in parallel model training, active learning, model deployment, TensorRT conversion
• Contributed to publications related to computer vision or machine learning
• Experience working with C++ and python in a production environment
• Experience designing high-speed feedback processes for research organizations
• Experience improving and delivering reliable software through continuous integration, automated testing and code reviews
• Experience performing root cause analysis on sophisticated integrated systems, experience working with QA engineers, knowledge of QA concepts and methodology
• Understanding of JIRA and program management tools and processes

Why Cruise?

• Our benefits are here to support the whole you:
  • Competitive salary and benefits 
  • 401(k) Cruise matching program 
  • Medical / dental / vision, AD+D and Life
  • One Medical membership
  • Flexible vacation and company paid holidays
  • Healthy meals and snacks provided for non-remote employees
  • Paid parental leave
  • Fertility Benefits 
  • Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account, subsidized by Cruise
  • Flexible Spending Account 
  • Monthly wellness stipend
  • Pre-tax Commuter Benefit Plan for non-remote employees

• We’re Remote Friendly
  • We believe that your value to the team can be provided at a Cruise office or from the comfort of your home. Depending on your function, enjoy the flexibility of remote work and join our growing community of remote employees in the continental United States.

• We’re Integrated
  • Through our partnerships with General Motors and Honda, we are the only self-driving company with fully integrated manufacturing at scale.

• We’re Funded
  • GM, Honda, Microsoft, SoftBank, & T. Rowe Price, have invested billions in Cruise. Their backing for our technology demonstrates their confidence in our progress, team, and vision and makes us one of the leading autonomous vehicle organizations in the industry. Our deep resources greatly accelerate our operating speed.

• We’re Independent
  • We have our own governance, board of directors, equity, and investors. Our independence allows us to not just work on the edge of technology, but also define it.

• We’re Vested
  • You won’t just own your work here, you’ll have the potential to own equity in Cruise, too. We are competing in a market that is projected to grow exponentially, which gives our company valuation room to grow.

Cruise LLC is an equal opportunity employer. We strive to create a supportive and inclusive workplace where contributions are valued and celebrated, and our employees thrive by being themselves and are inspired to do the best work of their lives. 

We seek applicants of all backgrounds and identities, across race, color, ethnicity, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or parental status, or disability. Applicants will not be discriminated against based on these or other protected categories or social identities. Cruise will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, in accordance with applicable laws.

Cruise is committed to the full inclusion of all applicants. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process please let our recruiting team know or email HR@getcruise.com.

We proactively work to design hiring processes that promote equity and inclusion while mitigating bias. To help us track the effectiveness and inclusivity of our recruiting efforts, please consider answering the following demographic questions. Answering these questions is entirely voluntary. Your answers to these questions will not be shared with the hiring decision makers and will not impact the hiring decision in any way. Instead, Cruise will use this information not only to comply with any government reporting obligations but also to track our progress toward meeting our diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging objectives.

Note to Recruitment Agencies: Cruise does not accept unsolicited agency resumes. Furthermore, Cruise does not pay placement fees for candidates submitted by any agency other than its approved partners.