Senior Applied Scientist - Online Assurance

Who are we? 

Based in Oxford and with offices in Canada and the US, Oxa is an international startup founded in 2014 and scaling up rapidly (300+ Oxbots and growing). 

As the global leader in our industry, we’re fuelled by a bold purpose: to make the Earth move better. From passenger shuttles to industrial vehicles, our operating system for Universal Autonomy™ is transforming the way people and goods are transported by enabling any vehicle, in any environment, to operate autonomously — safely, securely and efficiently.  

Our technology is capturing investors’ imagination. To date we’ve raised $140 million in our Series C investment round. Accommodating growing demand from new and current shareholders, this funding is driving our expansion in North America and EMEA, and accelerating the deployment of our technology in domains where there is both urgent need and potential to scale.  

Your Team

MetaDriver is a suite of tools that combines generative AI, digital twins and simulation to accelerate machine learning and testing of self-driving technology before and during real-world use. You will join our Oxa MetaDriver Team which is responsible for delivering these technologies to both internal and external customers. It comprises a wide range of disciplines from ML and simulation, to application development, cloud engineering and data capture professionals.

More specifically, you’ll join a new and growing team called Online Assurance. This team ensures that the company has a mechanism for answering safety-related questions and providing post-deployment assurance to sustain rapid improvement in its Universal Autonomy platform.

Your Role

• Researching and developing state of the art pipelines for analysing pre- and post-deployment domains for estimating risks and providing guarantees.
• Researching and developing state of the art techniques and processes for advancing representation learning for generating novel latent-space representations across simulation and real data.
• Researching and developing state of the art pipelines for model compression like distillation, quantization, sparsification, pruning, etc. 
• Keeping up with the latest advances in Machine Learning research, and applying relevant techniques to Oxa MetaDriver
• Contributing to the development tools and processes to support a common testing framework across the company, acquisition of data, ML frameworks and commercial operations
• Developing data visualisation tools
• Contributing to the creation of appropriate data tools that support, amplify, and accelerate our scaling of our system for development, testing, and commercial requirements.
• Contributing to the drive for efficiency around use of data in the company
• Contributing to the effort in making sure the right data is available at the right time
• across our technology platform,
• for our development processes, and
• for our deployments while in use with customers and partners.
• Working with other teams and leads in facilitating the creation of specialist tooling and process supporting the company wide data-agenda in both the data team and in specialist teams.

Requirements

What you need to succeed:

• A deep understanding in at least one of the following topics: Representation Learning, Unsupervised Learning, Supervised learning
• Experience with Machine Learning in a research environment
• Demonstrate proficiency in Python software development skills
• Machine Learning skills for data amplification and synthesis
• Solid software engineering design principles and up-to-date knowledge of Python best practices
• An ability to understand both technical and commercial requirements; some industrial experience where you’ve applied and implemented your research

Extra Kudos:

• Experience working with synthetic data
• Familiarity with cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• MLOps
• Working with driving simulators, autonomous driving software
• Working with large codebases
• Experience delivering a product/application/service to a customer (including business, internal or consumer customers)

The Candidate Journey:  Multi-Step and Two-Way

No-one wants to feel like a square peg in a round hole, so this process is designed to give you every chance to get the measure of us, and us of you. The various stages give you every opportunity to show your unique strengths and qualities, and enables each of us to establish if we’re a good fit for the other.  If the fit is good and you’re selected, you’re then in a position to do great work and thrive, which is what everyone wants. 

Benefits

We provide:

• Competitive salary, benchmarked against the market and reviewed annually
• Company share programme
• Hybrid and/or flexible work arrangements
• An outstanding £3,000 flexible benefits including private medical insurance, critical illness coverage, life assurance, EAP, group income protection
• Funded relocation support 
• Fully funded Visa sponsorship if required
• A salary exchange pension plan
• 25 days’ annual leave plus bank holidays
• A pet-friendly office environment
• Safe assigned spaces for team members with individual and diverse needs

Our Culture 

Diversity is a marathon not a sprint! It is a journey with no destination. We are on a mission to unlock the benefits of self-driving technology to every person and organisation on the planet. We are creating an environment where everyone, from any background, can do their best work which put simply is the right thing to do. We hire and nurture those we can learn from, valuing diversity and the innovation that this drives.

We apply a neuro inclusive lens to our recruitment process and want each potential Oxbot to enjoy the best experience possible for them. We promote an open and inclusive culture that empowers our Oxbots to bring their whole, authentic selves to work every day. Oxa is proud to be an inclusive organisation and, as such, we require all team members within our recruitment process to understand and deploy best practices focused on de-biasing the whole recruitment cycle.

Please share with us any individual needs or reasonable adjustments we may need to make in advance of commencing the interview process with us.

Learn more about our culture here.