Staff, Software Engineer - Motion Planning (Unstructured Environments)

About The Company:

At Torc, we have always believed that autonomous vehicle technology will transform how we travel, move freight, and do business. A leader in autonomous driving since 2007, Torc has spent over a decade commercializing our solutions with experienced partners. Now a part of the Daimler family , we are focused solely on developing software for automated trucks to transform how the world moves freight. Join us and catapult your career with the company that helped pioneer autonomous technology, and the first AV software company with the vision to partner directly with a truck manufacturer.

Meet The Team:

Torc is hiring a Staff Motion Planning Engineer to lead technical development for the planning, prediction, and decision-making systems that determine how our autonomous trucks navigate the world safely, efficiently, and predictably . Our team operates at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, optimization, simulation, and safety, building the core autonomy capabilities that translate perception into action.

What You'll Do:

This role is focused on motion planning, trajectory generation, and trajectory optimization for autonomous vehicles in unstructured environments. You will provide technical leadership across teams and platforms, driving architectural strategy, engineering excellence, and scalable system design. You will lead high-impact technical initiatives, influence long-term engineering direction, and contribute directly to the design, development, validation, and deployment of planning capabilities.

This role operates at a multi-team level with broad organizational impact. You will work closely with engineers and leaders across autonomy, controls, simulation, safety, and validation to help deliver safe, robust, and reliable autonomy behaviors at scale.

Technical Leadership

Defining and maintaining the architectural vision across teams, platforms, and services to ensure scalability, reliability, maintainability, long-term technical alignment, and consistency of software design patterns

Supporting Engineering Managers and Senior ICs in resolving complex technical design, architecture, and implementation challenges across multiple domains while balancing feasibility against business objectives

Establishing and promoting engineering best practices for code quality, automated testing, performance optimization, monitoring, security, and operational excellence

Conducting architecture reviews, technical deep dives, design sessions, and technical assessments to guide engineering decisions and solution direction

Mentoring and coaching senior and mid-level engineers while helping grow future Staff and Principal engineers through technical guidance and leadership development

Fostering a culture of engineering excellence, documentation, collaboration, innovation, and knowledge sharing across the organization

Translating complex technical concepts, trade-offs, and architectural decisions into clear recommendations for leadership and cross-functional stakeholders

Leading major technical initiatives such as platform modernization, observability enhancements, performance optimization, scalability improvements, and reliability engineering efforts

Software Development

Design, develop, and optimize motion planning algorithms including trajectory generation, trajectory selection, behavior planning, and optimization-based planning approaches for autonomous trucks.

Develop planning solutions leveraging techniques such as graph search, sampling-based planning, optimization-based planning, spline/B-spline trajectories, convex optimization, and Frenet-frame approaches.

Incorporate vehicle kinematic and dynamic constraints into planning systems to ensure safe, feasible, and comfortable vehicle behavior.

Develop production-quality software using modern C++ within a Linux environment while adhering to quality, safety, testing, and deployment best practices.

Collaborate closely with Safety, Controls, Perception, Validation, and Simulation teams to develop safe and reliable autonomous driving behaviors.

Testing, Integration, and Metrics

Develop and execute validation strategies across Software-in-the-Loop (SiL), Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL), and Vehicle-in-the-Loop (ViL) environments.