Software Engineer, Onboard Integration

Glydways•Richmond, CA

2d•$190,000 - $220,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Glydways is seeking a Software Engineer for its Onboard Integration team, which builds the software foundation that runs on every Glydways vehicle. This role is part of the Embedded Platform & Integration group and involves daily collaboration with Vehicle Hardware, Autonomy, Safety, and Track Operations teams to create a cohesive system. The work includes streaming data from sensors, controlling vehicle actuators, developing a custom embedded Linux OS, integrating ML runtimes, and writing tools for live track operations. This position requires a strong focus on reliability, as the software directly impacts real vehicles carrying passengers. The engineer will be responsible for taking problems from concept to code running on vehicles, working hands-on with hardware, and debugging across software, firmware, and electrical boundaries. Glydways is looking for engineers passionate about autonomous vehicles and PRT, who are proactive in ambiguous situations, can identify patterns in complex systems, and own their work from start to finish.

Requirements

4+ years of professional software engineering experience, including shipping and supporting production systems.
Strong proficiency in C++ or C for production systems—comfortable navigating and improving an existing codebase as well as writing new components.
Experience developing device drivers or low-level interfaces for sensors and/or actuators, including use of hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) or similar test frameworks.
Experience developing on resource-constrained embedded hardware (CPU, memory, storage, or bandwidth limited).
Solid understanding of communication protocols, from low-level (SPI, UART, CAN) to higher-level networking (TCP/UDP).
Experience with Linux, especially embedded environments (e.g., Yocto, Buildroot, or similar).
Experience with robotics middleware such as ARK, LCM, ROS, or ROS 2.
Ability to own features end-to-end: clarifying requirements, designing, implementing, testing, and supporting them in the field.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with ML inference runtimes and integrating ML models into production or edge systems (training experience is a plus, not required).
Contributions to open-source AI, robotics, or embedded frameworks.
Experience with automotive or other real-time, safety-critical systems.
Prior work in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or complex mechatronic systems.
Experience with performance engineering on embedded CPU/GPU and hardware accelerators.
Experience collaborating directly with operations and field teams to debug and improve systems running in production environments.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and test mission-critical onboard software that runs on every Glydways vehicle, from prototype to deployment on track.
Own high-performance interfaces to onboard devices—from cameras, radar, LiDAR, and IMUs to drive-by-wire, controls, and other vehicle systems.
Develop and integrate runtimes and middleware so autonomy and ML workloads can execute and communicate reliably onboard.
Design and improve systems for live track operations: software deployment, vehicle provisioning, logging, and observability.
Collaborate with Autonomy, Hardware, and Operations teams to define interfaces, build evaluation pipelines on real and simulated vehicles, and ship features to the fleet.
Investigate and debug issues on the bench and on-vehicle, driving them to root cause and stable fixes.
Shape technical direction for the areas you own, and raise the bar through design discussions and code reviews.