Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Fault Response Verification

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-functionally 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 Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Fault Response Verification, you will work very closely with the Autonomy development, eval infrastructure, and data science teams. You will partner closely with our Autonomy software engineering team to define system-level behavior requirements when a fault is present, implement metrics to assess requirement violations, build novel validation tooling and pipelines to achieve integration into our Safety Case and risk assessment frameworks, and contribute to risk quantification. 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 the system level down to modules through deterministic and probabilistic software-driven techniques towards a fail-operational system. Your work is expected to have a short-term impact on our next deployments, as well as a long-term impact on autonomy feature roadmapping and Nuro’s scaled fleet operations.

About the Work

• Dive into the system-level implications of Nuro’s autonomy architecture and software to understand the inter-dependency of failure modes with respect to the fault response.
• Define requirements for fault response with decomposition through the autonomy software and hardware architecture.
• 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, and closed-course testing to assess mission capabilities and safety.
• 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

• 5+ years of technical work experience in a relevant area with 3+ years of experience with software development.
• Hands-on software experience, with the ability to code proficiently in Python or C++.
• Bachelor’s Degree or Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Robotics, Physics, or a related field.
• Strong understanding of robotic systems architecture—how sensing, localization, perception, prediction, behavior, and control modules interact.
• Familiarity with simulation and real-world testing of autonomous systems.
• Highly collaborative in nature, with strong abilities to think and communicate analytically and effectively.
• Bonus Points:
  • Background in the development or validation of software for L4 autonomous vehicles.
  • Analyzing and managing FDIR (fault detection, isolation, recovery) for the software stack on semi-autonomous or autonomous vehicles or equipment.

At Nuro, your base pay is one part of your total compensation package. For this position, the reasonably expected base pay range is between $176,400 and $319,720 for the level at which this job has been scoped. Your base pay will depend on several factors, including your experience, qualifications, education, location, and skills. In the event that you are considered for a different level, a higher or lower pay range would apply. This position is also eligible for an annual performance bonus, equity, and a competitive benefits package.

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. #LI-DNP