Senior Software Engineer (Trajectory Planning)

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 (425+ ‘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

You will join our Planning Team, where we design, implement, test and deploy the Engine that drives the behaviour of Oxa’s Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), based on its understanding of its environment.

Your Role

As a Senior Software Engineer in Trajectory Planning, you will be responsible for designing, implementing, testing, and deploying algorithms that realise the desired behaviours that the AV needs to exhibit in any particular scenario. Specifically, this role will focus on planning the spatio-temporal trajectories that manifest the desired actions that the AV is executing in the presence of other actors while obeying traffic rules. You will work closely with Decision Making and Controls to plan and execute manoeuvres in a smooth, comfortable, and precise manner.

In this role, you will:

• Collaborate with your Team Lead and team members to solve Spatio-Temporal motion planning problems, including off-the-shelf solver evaluation and custom solver implementation.
• Collaborate with the Decision Making team to transcribe nuanced manoeuvres in complex on- and off-road environments into generalised Trajectory Planning problems.
• Collaborate with the Controls team to ensure Smooth, Comfortable, Precise manoeuvre execution for on- and off-road applications.
• Contribute to the development of high quality functionality and APIs that allow the Planner functionality to be used as a building block for on-vehicle capabilities.
• Create appropriate metrics and tools to measure and benchmark the performance of Planners deployed on various AV platforms.
• Work with customers, stakeholders, and peers to ensure the right solutions are delivered, and actively contribute to resolving disagreements through constructive dialog.
• Contribute significantly to the engineering lifecycle, including scoping, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance of your team's work.
• Influence technical strategy within the Planning Team, ensuring alignment with your Team Lead and your counterparts in other teams.
• Document and train others on your team's work, focus on improving features, and understand the business and customer value of your team's work.
• Positively impact product quality, customer experience, and maintainability, and take on projects that improve team processes and solutions.
• Contribute to hiring and onboarding at scale by defining role responsibilities and requirements, leading interviews, engaging in recruiting outreach for your team, and mentoring and developing new team members.

Requirements

What you need to succeed:

• PhD in related field (Mech Eng, Aerospace, Comp Science, Robotics, Mechatronics) with 2+ years of professional experience is desired
• MS in related field (Mech Eng, Aerospace, Comp Science, Robotics, Mechatronics) with 4+ years of professional experience is acceptable
• Extensive hands-on experience of optimisation-based trajectory planning
• Experience with sampling-based trajectory planning approaches
• Experience with trajectory planning problem formulation and problem transcription

• Modern C++ algorithm development and deployment, ideally in a production environment (including STL and common testing frameworks)

Extra kudos:

• Experience with technical and people leadership / management experience
• Dynamic Programming experience
• Knowledge of model Predictive Control, MPC (algorithm)
• Experience with iLQR (algorithm,implementation / utilisation)
• Experience with RRT (algorithm)
• Experience with vehicle dynamics and modelling
• Proven agility in fast-changing environments. As a scale-up, we’re constantly evolving so our people need to evolve too for us to succeed together.
• A customer-centric outlook. Chances are you won’t be directly customer facing, but we value people who anticipate and prioritise the needs of our customers. We call it ‘inventing on their behalf’.

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. There will be a live C++ coding assessment as part of the interview process. 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
• 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

We believe that diversity of thought and experience is a key driver of innovation. It also makes life, and work, more interesting. So ours is a culture that celebrates humanity in all its diversity and richness, and uses difference as fuel to grow and succeed together. Everyone is welcome, everyone has a voice, everyone is valued. And our work and people are all the better for it.

Learn more about our culture here .

Why become an Oxbot?

Our team of experts in computer science, AI, robotics and machine learning is world-class, and together they’re solving the most exciting and important technological challenges of our times.

But as well as smarts, Oxbots have heart. Our diverse, multi-cultural crew is guided by a shared vision to bring the myriad benefits of autonomy to our customers and partners. And in a company that celebrates uniqueness as much as skill and experience, they do it with energy, conviction and a healthy dose of excitement, too.

If you are bold, creative and hyper skilled, come and create the future of autonomy with us at Oxa.