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:

The Staff (or Senior) Engineer for ML in Planning - Modeling will provide hands-on technical leadership to introduce advanced machine learning techniques into the Cruise planning stack.  This will include developing a long-term roadmap, as well as guiding short term efforts consistent with the roadmap.  The integration of new ML technologies will leverage the existing search-based optimal planning capabilities, combining the advantages of both in order to achieve superhuman driving performance.  An important aspect of this Staff Engineer’s role will be inspirational leadership in mentoring and educating other team members, and the company as a whole, about the exciting new ML technologies and how they can be applied to autonomous driving.

What you’ll be doing:

• Provide technical leadership to the ML in Planning team (Staff)
• Work with the EM for this team to generate roadmaps and project plans (Staff)
• Ensure that the team, and the company as a whole, is at the forefront in the application of ML technologies to AV planning problems (Staff)
• Ensure the introduction and integration of new ML technologies in a practical manner that has high on-road impact
• Conduct design reviews, providing oral and written feedback, and presentations to management
• Provide hands-on guidance for implementations, including personally taking on the implementation of critical components
• Mentor and provide technical education to other team members, and external groups, enabling effective cross-collaboration between feature and project teams (Staff)
• Support performance reviews, and support the technical growth of other team members
• Act as a technical architect for the team, help define technical vision and strategy, and ensure the technical direction aligns with other teams across the company

What you must have:

• A track record of innovation in the field of machine learning for robotics planning and application of these technologies to real-world problems
• Experience developing machine learning planning and control algorithms that learn based on interactions with the environment, learning from both demonstration and reward, supplemented by supervised training
• Experience with algorithms that use simulation-based Deep Reinforcement Learning, possibly supplemented with demonstration learning algorithms like GAIL, in order to surpass expert demonstrator’s performance
• Experience with robotics simulation environments, model-based RL, and the use of model-predictive control to guide RL convergence
• Experience with robotics (ideally autonomous vehicles) and ROS
• Expertise in C++, Python, and modern software development environments and practices (familiarity with Git, Jira, for example)

Bonus Points!

• Understanding of risk-aware planning concepts and algorithms, and general uncertainty management
• Experience with inverse reinforcement learning, and algorithms that learn optimization cost functions
• Familiarity with actor-critic DRL methods where both demonstration and reinforcement learning is achieved based on rewards, rather than just imitating demonstration behaviors
• Experience with algorithms for parameter estimation
• Experience in runtime performance optimization of advanced search algorithms
• Data science experience, including query of large databases, and data analysis
• Prior work with numerical/scientific computing, particularly the utilization of GPUs to solve optimization problems

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.