Backend Engineer - Perception Platform Aurora
San Francisco, CA

Job Description

Aurora Overview

Bringing self-driving vehicles to our roads is the most transformative opportunity of our generation. Aurora is taking a fresh start with the development of self-driving technology, combining excellence in AI, rigorous engineering, and a team with decades of experience building robots that work.

Led by a team of seasoned experts, including three of the world's leaders of self-driving technology, our mission is to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly. We are designing the software and hardware to power the transportation of our future that will make our roads safer, give more people access to mobility, and reduce congestion and pollution in cities - improving the quality of life for all. The challenge in what we are endeavoring to achieve is transcendent; we are developing perhaps the world's most complex computing system and asking it to perform the task of transporting and keeping safe our most precious asset: human life.

We're looking for people who are as excited as we are to solve these complex problems and make this tremendous impact on our future, and who want to be surrounded by great people while we do it. The Perception Platform team is responsible for providing the datasets and platform for developing the Aurora Driver's perception systems.

Responsibilities

You will have the opportunity to work on different parts of the team's responsibilities depending on your interests and experiences:

* Scaling backend data management systems for perception scenarios, metrics and training / test datasets.
* Mining historic lidar, radar, and camera sensor data, vehicle logs and map datasets for long tail of scenarios using large scale distributed data processing pipelines.
* Building backend data pipelines for gathering high quality ground truth datasets for new perception capabilities and autonomous driving modes.
* Applied machine learning and computer vision for offline annotating historical sensor data logs with objects, traffic signs and events.
* Deliver overall high quality results in close collaboration with the larger Perception, Cloud, Tools, and other software teams.

Essential

* BS / MS in Computer Science, or a related field
* Excellent programming and software design skills
* Knowledgeable in C++ and Python
* Experience with database management systems (both relational and NoSQL)

Desirable

* Distributed System design patterns (high availability, scaling, load balancing, caching, sharding etc.)
* Experience working in a cloud environment (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc)
* Familiarity with geospatial datasets and geometric algorithms

Working at Aurora

Our work has real purpose. Delivering self-driving will improve lives around the world, expanding access to transportation, revitalizing cities, giving people more time back every day.

We're one team. We're inspired by the challenge of what we're solving and the impact our work will have on society. Our camaraderie is built on respect for our work and the fundamental belief our success will be a result of working together.

The Founding Team

Aurora has assembled the most experienced leadership team in the space. Chris Urmson helped lead Carnegie Mellon's efforts in Darpa's Grand Challenges, then was a founding member of Google's self-driving team. Sterling Anderson worked on the tech at MIT before leading Tesla's Autopilot system. Drew Bagnell, also a Carnegie Mellon alum, is a machine learning expert who helped build Uber's autonomy effort. At Aurora, these three continue to bring experts from all areas of the industry to the team. We are funded by some of Silicon Valley's best venture capital firms, including Greylock and Index Ventures.