Staff Software Engineer - Frameworks

Aurora•Seattle, WA

12h•Hybrid

About The Position

Aurora is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join its Autonomy Frameworks team. The team builds the robotics middleware powering the Aurora Driver: a runtime framework used by Autonomy and Simulation applications to communicate, execute, and interact with the vehicle platform on the road and offline in the cloud. In this role, you will shape the architecture of Aurora’s AV runtime framework across on-vehicle and offline execution. You will design high-performance, low-latency communication between modules; manage stack configuration and process lifecycles on vehicle compute platforms; and improve offline execution so on-vehicle behavior can be reproduced faithfully at scale. You will also develop capabilities for fault traceability, health monitoring, and recovery; create intuitive C++ APIs; support field testing and fleet operations; and mentor engineers while setting standards and guiding the framework roadmap.

Requirements

Bachelor’s, master’s, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent industry experience.
Expert-level C++ programming skills and ability to design high-performance, thread-safe, memory-efficient systems in a Linux environment.
Proven experience building middleware, runtime frameworks, or distributed systems, such as pub/sub messaging, IPC, schedulers, or executors.
Deep understanding of concurrency, memory models, and Linux systems internals, including processes, threads, scheduling, and shared memory.
Ability to work across multiple programming languages and paradigms.
Passion for writing robust, intuitive, pragmatic production code.
Ability to navigate and work effectively in large codebases.
Strong verbal and written communication skills.
Ability to work autonomously and collaborate effectively with colleagues across time zones.

Nice To Haves

Experience with robotics middleware such as ROS 2, ThreadX, or FreeRTOS, or with soft real-time systems.
Experience with deterministic simulation, log replay, or reproducible execution.
Experience with performance evaluation and optimization.
Experience with safety-critical systems.

Responsibilities

Define and evolve the architecture of Aurora’s AV runtime framework for on-vehicle and offline execution.
Design and implement high-performance, low-latency inter-module communication, including shared-memory, zero-copy IPC, and RPC.
Own stack configuration, deployment, and process lifecycle management on the vehicle compute platform.
Improve the determinism, fidelity, and performance of offline execution so on-vehicle behavior can be reproduced at scale.
Build framework capabilities for fault traceability, health monitoring, and recovery to support Aurora’s safety case.
Design intuitive C++ APIs that make effective patterns easy for Autonomy engineers to use.
Provide engineering support for field testing and fleet operations.
Mentor senior engineers, set coding standards, and drive the long-term roadmap for the AV framework.