Senior Software Engineer, Autonomy Platform

Have you ever worked somewhere that challenges you every day? A place where you solve meaningful problems, build exciting technology, and work alongside people who genuinely enjoy collaborating?

If you work in the Bay Area, you probably have. What makes Zendar special then?

We don't really do politics, we don't have meetings “just for show” or “to make leadership happy”. We are the masters of both prototyping very fast, and at the same time taking more effort or another iteration on a design where needed. And we carefully choose people we work with and it really shows in our team culture - we are a team of driven, smart and humble engineers from all around the world. No toxic corporate clones, please.

Sounds interesting?

Zendar is looking for an experienced Software Engineer with passion for SW design and desire to bring things to life in the real world. If you have years of SW background, your heart beats for good design and you can keep up with the fast pace of a startup, you might like the challenge. Our team is a testament of the ability to unite engineers of different backgrounds over a common vision. We do not shy away from reality and its limitations but we also dream big.

You don't have to fit in a box. We are not looking for a superhero. But we might be looking for you!

About Zendar:

Zendar builds a radar-centric autonomy stack which makes any vehicle - from cars to robots - autonomous in any environment. With our deep radar DNA, we have architected our solution to put RF sensing at the core of all perception. The result is a system that handles long range, high speeds, and bad weather not as edge cases but as a core strength of the autonomy stack.

Because radars naturally measure both 3D position and velocity for every object in the environment, radar-centric autonomy is extremely compute- and data-efficient. Our autonomous vehicle needs only a few thousand dollars of hardware to make it completely autonomous, making this the cheapest way to build an autonomous vehicle by far.

See a demo of Zendar's foundational RF perception and driving functions.

To develop this capability we had to build the entire stack in house - from radar sensor hardware to signal processing to multi-modal perception foundation models and path and trajectory planning. As part of a small team, you will have a front-row seat to seeing how a complete autonomy stack is architected and how your engineering decisions improve the ability to navigate autonomously in the real world.

Although AI is central to what we build, our hiring process is intentionally human: every résumé is reviewed by a real person.

Role Overview:

Our Software Platform team builds all the sensor, data, and demo infrastructure that makes Zendar run. As a result, this team interacts with every other engineering team at Zendar to do things like integrate and bring up new sensors, launch demos of new models and algorithms, visualize radar data in real time, and scalably collect data for training ML models. All of this comes together in our evaluation kit (EVK) which is the primary way that our customers interact with all of Zendar's technology.

We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer to join the Platform team of 5 engineers (3 in Berkeley and 2 in Lindau, Germany) with a strong team culture and wide range of expertise, from low-level device drivers up to UI development. You will contribute to all those levels of abstraction across a wide range of project types. This role is ideal for someone with very strong software fundamentals, and comfort and eagerness to learn new domains and challenge themself.

Key Responsibilities:

• Enable Development of New Perception-based Platforms
  • Integrate new models and algorithms into existing application
  • Work with research teams to support Motion planning and Control of vehicle development
• Develop and Maintain Data Collection Platform
  • Support data collection requirements from our ML team by adapting the current platform with new sensors and features
• Set and Maintain Software Standards
  • Drive the team to uphold good SW development practices like testing or efficient deployment
  • Work with teams in the company to maintain unified SW architecture across platforms

What We're Looking For:

• Ability to work from the office in Berkeley, CA, at least from Tuesday to Thursday.
• 5+ years of experience in SW engineering.
• Proficiency with C++ and Python.
• Experience leading features from design through production.
• Ability to break down complex problems into well-defined technical solutions.
• A proactive approach to solving problems and willingness to take on new challenges as they arise.
• Somebody with solid opinions based on experience, yet open-minded and flexible to find the best solution for the situation.

Bonus Points For:

• Experience working with hardware, especially automotive sensors (radar, lidar, camera, CANbus)
• Experience with Javascript or UI development
• Experience with working with Linux
• A track record of excelling in ambiguous or evolving roles in a fast-paced environment

Example of current projects to be involved in this role:

• We are currently on a 3rd iteration of our data collection rig and we are just starting to work on the next generation. We need a solution with enough robustness and stability to get us through the day of data collection without issues, which we can customize and most importantly develop on our own so that we are not dependent on external support. We are including new sensors and the number of them is always growing so keeping up with the growing data load is critical.
• Our perception models currently run primarily on a GPU laptop in the demo cars but we are developing an embedded solution as well to get closer to production-ready kit. The Platform team is taking care of integrating the new C++-only inference pipeline into our ecosystem by developing a control application, interacting with our in-house UI and the performant backend.
• Even though we talk about CI/CD in Zendar and our CI is not something developers complain about often (yay!), the deployment part still needs to be developed. We want to move away from checking out code on our platforms and locally building, to a distribution of the released SDK.
• The next generation of our UI has been developed this year and it now covers most functionality needed for customer demos. However, we want the new UI to be also used for debugging issues and analysing scenes, which will require new features.

What We Have To Offer:

• Opportunity to make an impact at a young, venture-backed company in an emerging market
• Collaboration with smart and motivated engineers and ability to execute your vision in a high impact role
• Competitive salary ranging from $160,000-200,000 annually depending on experience
• Performance based Bonus
• Benefits including medical, dental, and vision insurance, flexible PTO, and equity
• Daily catered lunch and a stocked fridge

Zendar is an equal opportunity employer.

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