Senior Research Engineer (Scenario Expansion)

Who are we? 

Oxa is enabling the transition to self-driving vehicles through an initial focus on the most commercially advanced sector; the autonomous shuttling of goods and people.

We are home to some of the world’s leading experts on autonomous vehicles, creating solutions such as Oxa Driver, equipping vehicles with full self-driving functionality; Oxa MetaDriver, using Generative AI to accelerate and assure the safety of deployments; and Oxa Hub, a set of cloud-based offerings for autonomous fleet management. Our technology is being deployed across the UK and the U.S, and we’re partnering with a fast-growing ecosystem of operators, vehicle OEMs and equipment makers serving autonomous transportation globally as it advances.

Based in Oxford, and with offices in Canada and the U.S, Oxa was founded in 2014 and is  growing rapidly (350+ ‘Oxbots’ to date). Our purpose is to change the way the Earth moves, through an uncompromising focus on safety, efficiency and explainability of our AI approaches. The company has attracted $225 million from leading investors so far, with $140 million raised in the last Series C funding round in January 2023.

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.

Specifically, you’ll be working in the scenario expansion workstream.

Your Role

• Researching and developing state of the art pipelines for scenario synthesis, reinforcement learning, motion prediction, representation learning
• Contributing to tooling and processes for benchmarking, filtering, visualisation and comparison of synthetically generated driving scenarios
• Developing state of the art techniques and processes for assuring data coverage
• Keeping up with the latest advances in Machine Learning research, and applying relevant techniques to Oxa MetaDriver
• Contributing to the development tools and process to support the scenario synthesis, acquisition of data, software-in-loop simulation and ML frameworks
• Developing model optimisation techniques
• 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 of Reinforcement Learning
• Experience with one or more of: Imitation Learning, Representation Learning, Unsupervised 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.

Extra kudos will be awarded for:

• Experience with efficiently benchmarking and validating synthetic data
• Familiarity with cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Experience with MLOps
• Experience working with driving simulators, autonomous driving software, or traffic modelling
• Familiarity with C or C++

Benefits

We provide:

• Competitive salary, benchmarked against the market and reviewed annually
• Company share programme
• Hybrid and/or flexible work arrangements
• Core benefits of market leading private healthcare, life assurance, critical illness cover, income protection, alongside a company paid health cash plan (including gym discounts)
• A flexible £2,000 (pro-rata) benefits fund to spend on additional benefits of your choice, including tech scheme and cycle to work benefits
• 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.