Systems Engineer, Autonomy, Fault Detection and Response

Who We Are 

Nuro is a robotics start-up whose mission is to accelerate the benefits of robotics for everyday life. We have an elite team of entrepreneurs and engineers, designers, and scientists. We believe AI and robotics are at the cusp of transforming daily life, and we are dedicated to building meaningful products with this technology. Join us and play a critical role in our mission.

About The Team

The Systems Engineering team is responsible for the requirements, architecture, and validation of autonomous driving capabilities across engineering disciplines. This includes designing performance metrics, evaluation methods, and criteria for success, which the team then drives cross-functional via requirement definition and system validation. Systems Engineering works at the intersection of hardware, software, and robot operations, with a deep understanding of technologies in all three. We are a small, high-impact team that sets the checkpoints for autonomy deployment. 

About The Role

As a Systems Engineer, Autonomy Software, Fault Detection and Response you will work very closely with the software engineering, autonomy product, and data science teams. You will build scalable validation methodology for fault detection, isolation and recovery, and tools for assessing autonomy performance and behavior in degraded states. As a key part of Nuro's systems approach, you will contribute to maintaining Autonomy’s fault-centric architecture and stress test the autonomy software stack from system level down to modules through deterministic and probabilistic software-driven techniques. Your work is expected to have short term impact in our next deployments, as well as long term impact on autonomy feature roadmapping and Nuro’s scaled fleet operations.

About Your Work

• Dive into the system-level implications of Nuro’s autonomy architecture and software to understand inter-dependency of failure modes.
• Define requirements for fault handling throughout the autonomy software system.
• Drive fault-centric validation concepts from prototype to production to test.
• Support the development of tools and data engineering frameworks that can inject faults into the autonomy stack and interpret results from curated amounts of simulation, on-road, closed course testing to assess mission capabilities and safety.
• Define requirements for robot behavior for contingency maneuvers in the event of faults or degraded states.
• Work closely with autonomy developers to extract high-impact metrics and performance indicators that will test our robots’ readiness to drive autonomously on public roads in the event of degraded states of software.
• Contribute to tooling for automated evaluation of issues in test logs that check for satisfaction of contingency requirements.

About You

• Bachelor’s Degree or Master’s Degree candidate in Computer Science, Math, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Robotics, Physics, or related field.
• Strong programming and algorithmic problem solving skills in C++/C or Python.
• Technically fluent and experience working in a team with strong software engineering practices.
• Highly collaborative in nature with strong abilities to think and communicate analytically and effectively.
• Self starter and fast learner - you should be passionate about picking up new skills and approaching unstructured problems from first principles.
• You must have at least 3 years of experience in one or a combination of the following (not necessarily in industry):
  1. Software development or QA in one or more of autonomy’s core modules: localization, perception prediction, planning, controls, teleoperation.
  2. Experience with Linux or Unix computer systems engineering such as communication protocols, designing fault-tolerant systems, and atomicity and coordination of concurrent activities.
  3. Analyzing and managing FDIR (fault detection, isolation, recovery) for the software stack on semi-autonomous or autonomous vehicles or equipment.
  4. Defining requirements using data-driven and first-principle techniques.
  5. Implementing test coverage for faults.
  6. Identifying emergent behavior in a safety-critical complex system including interactions between modules.
  7. End-to-end functional decomposition, defining physical/logical architectures, allocating functionality, and reliability analysis of safety-critical complex systems via STPA or other hazard analysis techniques.
  8. Adaptive stress testing or probabilistic software diagnostics.

At Nuro, we celebrate differences and are committed to a diverse workplace that fosters inclusion and psychological safety for all employees. Nuro is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and expressly prohibits any form of workplace discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristics.

You must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by your hire date to be eligible to start the role. Proof of vaccination will be required by your start date. Nuro will consider and review accommodation requests based on medical, religious, or other grounds as required by applicable law for qualified candidates.