Applied Intuition
Vehicle Controls - Technical Lead
$150K–$250K
Sunnyvale · On-site · Full-time · Posted Oct 2, 2026
- Experience
- 6+ years; includes experience leading engineers or owning a technical area.
- Education
- MSc or PhD in mechanical engineering, robotics, or computer science, with coursework or research experience in controls.
About the job
Leads the development, deployment, and scaling of safety-critical vehicle controls for autonomous heavy equipment, while guiding the controls team and customer deployments.
What you'll do
- Set technical direction and design controllers from actuation through lateral and longitudinal trajectory tracking.
- Develop vehicle characterization and calibration workflows, and deploy controls across production fleets.
- Mentor and lead the controls team, prioritize work, and collaborate with customers during field deployments.
What they ask for
- MSc or PhD in mechanical engineering, robotics, or computer science, with coursework or research experience in controls.
- 6+ years building production software using modern software practices, including leading engineers or owning a technical area.
- Hands-on experience taking controls solutions from prototype through deployment on production-grade vehicles.
- Fluency in differential equations, numerical optimization, numerical analysis, and physics.
Nice to have
- Experience writing safety-critical, high-performance software using modern C++.
- Experience with quadratic programming and nonlinear optimization, heavy equipment or off-road platforms, or fleet calibration and system-identification tooling.
Pay
$150K – $250K USD base salary
Tools
modern C++, nonlinear MPC, MPPI, quadratic programming
AI focus
Develops controls for autonomous heavy equipment, including optimal-control-based approaches such as nonlinear MPC and MPPI.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative