Staff Engineer (Planning / Decision Making)

Oxa is enabling the transition to self-driving vehicles through an initial focus on the most commercially advanced sector; the autonomous shuttling of goods and people.

We are home to some of the world's leading experts on autonomous vehicles, creating solutions such as Oxa Driver, equipping vehicles with full self-driving functionality; Oxa MetaDriver, using Generative AI to accelerate and assure the safety of deployments; and Oxa Hub, a set of cloud-based offerings for autonomous fleet management. Our technology is being deployed across the UK and the U.S, and we're partnering with a fast-growing ecosystem of operators, vehicle OEMs and equipment makers serving autonomous transportation globally as it advances.

Based in Oxford, and with offices in Canada and the U.S, Oxa was founded in 2014 and is growing rapidly (350+ ‘Oxbots' to date). Our purpose is to change the way the Earth moves, through an uncompromising focus on safety, efficiency and explainability of our AI approaches. The company has attracted $225 million from leading investors so far, with $140 million raised in the last Series C funding round in January 2023.

Your Team

You will join our growing Planning Team, where we design, implement, test, and deploy the Engine that defines the behavior and motion of Oxa's Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), based on our understanding of the environment.

Your Role

As a Staff Engineer in Decision Making, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, testing, and deploying the driving policy that realizes human-like, predictable, and safe AV driving. Specifically, this role will focus on behavior/maneuver planning for the AV in complicated on-road and off-road applications, leveraging state-of-the-art robotics and AI algorithms. You will work closely with Perception, Mapping, Trajectory Planning, ML Reasoning, and other teams in a highly cross-functional development environment.

In this role, you will:

• Lead the development, integration, and deployment of AV reasoning software that drives our AVs through complex on-road and off-road environments.
• Take ownership of the architecture and strategic direction of your team, and overall shape the development of the Oxa Driver.
• Promote a cross-functional development style and closely collaborate with routing, trajectory planning, machine learning, and other teams to achieve human-like, predictable, and safe AV driving behaviors.
• Drive the adoption of engineering and software development best practices in your team.
• Create appropriate metrics and tools to measure and benchmark the performance of the planning software stack deployed in various environments.
• Take ownership of the engineering lifecycle, including scoping, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance of your team's work.
• Document and train others on your team's work, focus on improving features, and understand the business and customer value of your team's work.
• Spearhead hiring and onboarding at scale by defining role responsibilities and requirements, leading interviews, engaging in recruiting outreach for your team, and mentoring and developing new team members.
• Positively impact product quality, customer experience, and maintainability, and identify projects that improve team processes and solutions.

What you need to succeed:

• PhD in related field (Mech Eng, Aerospace, Comp Science, Robotics, Mechatronics) with 3+ years of industry experience is desired
• MS in related field (Mech Eng, Aerospace, Comp Science, Robotics, Mechatronics) with 5+ years of industry experience is acceptable
• Practical experience with Behavior Planning, Decision Making and Trajectory Planning for autonomous driving
• A deep understanding of Robotics Fundamentals, including:
• Robotics architectures
• 2D/3D Geometry & transformations
• Vehicle kinematics and dynamics
• Probability handling and uncertainty representation
• Bonus: Understanding of Trajectory Optimization techniques
• Prior tech lead experience in a robotics software development team (preferably focused on autonomous driving), guiding and mentoring team members.
• Experience with integrating and deploying complex robotics algorithms on target hardware in safety-critical environments.
• Strong C++ and basic Python software development skills, including modern C++ algorithm development and deployment in a production environment.
• Deep understanding of modern software engineering practices, including automated testing and continuous integration.
• Understanding of machine learning techniques for prediction, Decision Making, and/or motion planning in the AV space.

Extra kudos:

• Experience with RSS (Responsibility-Sensitive Safety), SFF (Safety Force Field), or related concepts.
• A customer-obsessed mindset. We value people who relentlessly try to anticipate and prioritise the needs of our customers. We call it ‘inventing on their behalf.'

• Familiarity with Google Cloud Platform.
• Relevant publications or talks in robotics or related conferences/journals.
• Experience with people management

We provide:

• Competitive salary, benchmarked against the market and reviewed annually
• Hybrid and/or flexible work arrangements
• An outstanding £2,000 flexible benefits including private medical insurance, critical illness coverage, life assurance, EAP, group income protection
• A salary exchange pension plan
• 25 days' annual leave plus bank holidays
• A pet-friendly office environment
• Safe assigned spaces for team members with individual and diverse needs

Our Culture:

We promote an open and inclusive culture that empowers our Oxbots to bring their whole, authentic selves to work every day. Oxa is proud to be an inclusive organisation and, as such, we require all team members within our recruitment process to understand and deploy best practices focused on de-biasing the whole recruitment cycle.We also apply a neuro inclusive lens to our recruitment process and want each potential Oxbot to enjoy the best experience possible for them. Please share with us any individual needs or reasonable adjustments we may need to make in advance of commencing the interview process with us.

Learn more about our culture here.

Why become an Oxbot?

Our team of experts in computer science, AI, robotics and machine learning is world-class, and together they're solving the most exciting and important technological challenges of our times.

But as well as smarts, Oxbots have heart. Our diverse, multi-cultural crew is guided by a shared vision to bring the myriad benefits of autonomy to our customers and partners. And in a company that celebrates uniqueness as much as skill and experience, they do it with energy, conviction and a healthy dose of excitement, too.

If you are bold, creative and hyper skilled, come and create the future of autonomy with us at Oxa.