Gatik
Senior Behavior Planning Engineer
$180K–$260K
Santa Clara, CA +1 · Senior · Full-time · Posted Aug 7, 2025
- Location
- Santa Clara, CA
Santa Clara, California, United States - Experience
- Ph.D. with 3+ years or Master’s with 5+ years of industry experience.
- Education
- Ph.D. or Master’s.
About the job
Build and lead development of the behavior-planning system that enables autonomous vehicles to make safe, intelligent decisions.
What you'll do
- Design and maintain behavior-planning systems and behavior-tree architectures for missions, maneuvers, and contingencies.
- Develop and optimize C++ infrastructure for simulation, debugging, visualization, and closed-loop testing; evaluate planner performance and improve robustness.
- Collaborate across autonomy teams, support system integration, and provide technical leadership and mentorship.
What they ask for
- Ph.D. with 3+ years or Master’s with 5+ years of industry experience in robotics, autonomous systems, or behavior planning.
- Experience with behavior planning using behavior trees, finite state machines, or rule-based planners in autonomous driving or robotics.
- Strong C++ proficiency, including performance, memory management, and production software architecture.
- Understanding of motion-planning and prediction interfaces, and experience building real-time, safety-critical systems.
Nice to have
- Knowledge of diffusion models and/or Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.
Pay
$180,000- $260,000 USD base salary
Tools
C++, behavior trees, finite state machines, diffusion models, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models
AI focus
Develop behavior-planning systems for autonomous vehicles, including behavior-tree decision logic and evaluation of planner performance. Knowledge of diffusion models and/or VLA models is a plus.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative