Senior Robotics Engineer, Path & Trajectory Planning

Zendar • Berkeley, CA

1d • $140,000 - $190,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Zendar is looking for a robotics engineer with a focus on path planning and trajectory prediction to join our Berkeley office. Zendar develops one of the best vehicular perception systems for automotive based on a 360-degree radar/camera system. Now we are expanding our capabilities to deliver full driving functions. We are not bogged down by legacy systems and by joining us, you have the opportunity to define and own the driving system.
About Zendar:
Zendar is building perception for physical AI—giving engineers a strong foundation for creating world-class robotics applications. At Zendar, you’ll work on perception foundation models that enable robots to understand and interact with their environments across a wide range of industries.

Zendar pioneered RF perception that delivers a vision-like, semantically segmented understanding of the environment—running on embedded automotive systems using only radar data. This RF perception forms the backbone of Zendar’s next-generation foundation models, which are built around early fusion of RF and vision data.

This architecture inverts the traditional perception stack. Instead of treating RF signals as secondary, Zendar’s models combine vision’s high angular resolution with RF’s strong temporal and spatial understanding at the earliest stages of perception. The result is a system that sees farther, remains robust to occlusion and adverse weather, and operates far more efficiently than vision-only or lidar-based approaches.
See a demo of Zendar’s foundational RF perception

At Zendar, you’ll work at the cutting edge of autonomous mobility and robotics—advancing foundation models that will power the next generation of physical AI systems. You’ll work with large-scale, real-world, multi-modal datasets composed of synchronized and calibrated radar, camera, and lidar data collected across multiple continents.

Our team brings together deep expertise across hardware, signal processing, machine learning, and software engineering, with decades of experience in sensing and perception. We are a global team with offices in Berkeley, Lindau (Germany), and Paris (France). Zendar is well-funded by leading Tier-1 venture capital firms and has established strong industry partnerships.

Although AI is central to what we build, our hiring process is intentionally human: every résumé is reviewed by a real person.
Your Role:
Zendar’s Semantic Spectrum perception technology extracts a rich scene understanding from radar sensing. Our next goal is to build an AV planner which can use this information to deliver more reliable operation in any weather and lighting, and faster responsiveness when operating at high speeds. This will demonstrate how more informative radar sensing, fused with other sensor modalities, can solve hard challenges in AV deployment on freeways and in challenging weather conditions.
We are seeking an experienced Robotics Engineer specializing in path and trajectory planning to join our engineering team. In this role, you will develop and optimize motion planning algorithms to perform highway Navigation on Autopilot (NoA) and eventually scale to city. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in motion planning theory, optimization techniques, and real-time algorithm implementation. Being the first path planner engineer on the team, you will take significant ownership of the design and implementation of our path planning and trajectory prediction pipeline. This is an ideal position for an engineer who enjoys building path planning systems and validating them in real-world driving scenarios.
In this role you will have a close communication and collaboration with the platform, machine learning and perception teams. You will work with our real-world dataset of tens of thousands of kilometers collected in multiple continents and geographies. We also have a test vehicle with actuation enabled which serves as a test platform for all planning and driving functions - today it can do adaptive cruise control (ACC), but your goal would be to expand those capabilities!

Requirements

• Proficiency with Python and C++
• 3+ years of experience in motion planning, path planning, or trajectory optimization
• Hands-on experience on designing and implementing of path planning and trajectory prediction models in relevant fields including robotics and ADAS
• Familiarity with professional software development tools, such as source control (git), unit testing, and profiling
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Model Predictive Control (MPC) or other predictive planning techniques
• Knowledge of machine learning approaches for motion planning (learning-based planners, neural motion planning)
• Good understanding of challenges in machine learning pipeline design such as data collection and processing, model test and evaluation

Responsibilities

• develop and optimize motion planning algorithms to perform highway Navigation on Autopilot (NoA) and eventually scale to city
• take significant ownership of the design and implementation of our path planning and trajectory prediction pipeline

Benefits

• Opportunity to make an impact at a young, venture-backed company in an emerging market
• Competitive salary ranging from $140,000-$190,000 annually depending on experience
• Performance based Bonus
• Benefits including medical, dental, and vision insurance, flexible PTO, and equity
• Hybrid work model: in office 3 days per week from Tuesday to Thursday, the rest… work from wherever!
• Daily catered lunch and a stocked fridge (when working out of the Berkeley, CA office)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed