Software Engineer II, Perception

Aurora•Pittsburgh, PA

1d•$126,000 - $201,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Aurora is seeking a Software Engineer and machine learning practitioner to join its Perception Tracker Team. The role contributes to improving the Aurora Driver’s perception performance and expanding its driverless operational domain across routes in the United States. The work involves end-to-end perception challenges, including tracking dynamic actors, recognizing actions and attributes, and developing semantic understanding of varied traffic environments. The engineer will research and develop machine learning models for challenging real-world scenarios, collaborate across teams to turn on-road and simulated testing insights into robust software, and take solutions from prototype through production. The role also contributes to architectural strategy and team collaboration to keep perception systems scalable and efficient. Potential projects include object tracking, sensor information fusion, object attribute classification, model-training pipelines, and analysis and resolution of system failure modes.

Requirements

Master’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or a bachelor’s degree with at least one year of relevant industry experience in software engineering.
Proficient software engineering skills in C++ and Python, with an emphasis on clean, scalable, efficient, production-quality code.
Basic knowledge in one or more of deep learning, computer vision, recursive state estimation, structured prediction, or numerical optimization.
Basic knowledge of 3D object-tracking algorithms.
Experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, or other deep learning frameworks.

Nice To Haves

Strong grasp of linear algebra, discrete and continuous optimization, supervised and unsupervised methods, generative and discriminative methods, and Hidden Markov Models.
Hands-on experience with VLM, foundational models, or world models.
Hands-on experience in CUDA or high-performance GPU programming for accelerated computing.
Experience deploying production-grade computer vision or machine learning models in real-time computing environments.
Demonstrated experience automating machine learning workflows and optimizing training pipelines for efficiency.
Contributions to open-source projects.
Publications at top-tier robotics or computer vision conferences or journals, or strong relevant industry experience in robotics, computer vision, or self-driving technology.
Ability to thrive in highly collaborative, cross-functional engineering environments.

Responsibilities

Tackle end-to-end perception challenges, including tracking dynamic actors, recognizing actions and attributes, and understanding diverse traffic environments.
Research and develop machine learning models to improve perception performance in challenging real-world conditions, including different driving environments, long-range multi-sensor tracking, varying weather, and degraded sensor conditions.
Collaborate cross-functionally to improve the Perception system and translate on-road and simulated testing insights into robust, well-tested software.
Drive software development from prototype to production, including large-scale data analysis and deployment of production-ready solutions on the real-time Aurora Driver platform.
Contribute to architectural strategy and team collaboration to ensure perception systems remain scalable and efficient.
Design and implement object-tracking algorithms and algorithms that extract, leverage, and fuse information from different sensors.
Develop machine learning systems for object tracking and attribute classification.
Build and improve model pipelines for large-scale, efficient model training.
Analyze failure modes and implement and test solutions to address identified issues.