Principal Machine Learning Engineer – Autonomy

Principal Machine Learning Engineer – Autonomy Department: Engineering Team: Machine Learning Location: Sunnyvale, United States Type: Full-Time **About the Role** As a Principal ML Engineer, you will be at the forefront of Physical AI, developing core components of our Autonomous Driving stack. You will set the technical direction for the development and implementation of state-of-the-art machine learning across the autonomy pipeline. You aren't just solving known problems; you are identifying the next generation of challenges in AV, designing the architectural foundations to solve them, and raising the bar for technical excellence across the entire engineering organization. You will collaborate with engineers across big data, compute, and cloud engineering to build platforms that harness scale and real-world complexity to reimagine how the world moves. **What You’ll Do** - **Strategic Autonomy Development:** Lead the strategy for Autonomous Driving Algorithm Development, ensuring our stack is robust, safe, and capable of handling the most complex urban edge cases - **Next-Generation Autonomy:** Provide the overarching technical vision for our multi-modal autonomy systems. You will lead the design of state-of-the-art foundation models to achieve highly accurate, real-time understanding of the world, and seamlessly translate this semantic understanding into cutting-edge Physical AI models that dictate safe, human-like decision-making and trajectory generation - **Architecture & System Design:** Design and oversee the implementation of complex, large-scale ML systems, ensuring seamless integration between upstream sensor data and downstream actuation, while relentlessly optimizing deep learning models for strict onboard latency, compute, and kinematic constraints - **Technical Mentorship & Influence:** Mentor senior and lead engineers, fostering a culture of rigorous experimentation and engineering excellence. You will influence the technical direction of multiple teams - **Cross-Organizational Leadership:** Act as a bridge between AV Labs and other Uber engineering units to ensure that autonomous technolo