Autonomy Engineer

Brain Corp is a San Diego, California, USA-based AI company creating transformative core technology for the robotics industry. Our purpose is to create autonomous technology that helps the real world work better. Brain's robotic and AI solutions help retailers ensure that the right product is on the right shelf at the right price, in a clean environment. Through the BrainOS® Robotics Platform, which powers the largest global fleet of the Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) in operation in commercial public spaces, Brain Corp delivers insightful and efficient automated solutions in both commercial floor cleaning and inventory management, empowering organizations and their employees to achieve more. Brain Corp currently powers more than 30,000 AMRs, representing the largest fleet of its kind in the world. Brain Corp is funded by the SoftBank Vision Fund, Clearbridge, and Qualcomm Ventures.

Named a top workplace by the San Diego Union Tribune and USA today in 2025, we make life-changing impacts through innovation, helping workers globally unlock their abilities in orchestration with intelligent machines.

Position Overview:

As a Staff Autonomy Engineer on our R&D team, you'll be one of the technical leaders setting direction for the AI that powers our robots. This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you'll architect systems that span perception, mapping, prediction, and planning; drive multi-quarter initiatives from research idea to fleet rollout; and raise the technical bar across the org. You'll work across team boundaries, partnering with engineering managers, product, and hardware to make decisions that ripple through the roadmap. You'll also be someone the team learns from — through code review, design review, mentorship, and the standards you set in your own work. We expect Staff engineers to be comfortable in deep technical waters across the modern autonomy stack: foundation models, learned policies, classical estimation and planning, and the production systems that knit them together.

Essential Job Functions:

Technical Leadership and Direction

• Set technical direction for major areas of the autonomy stack — perception, SLAM, prediction, planning, or the ML systems underneath them — and own the multi-quarter roadmaps that follow.
• Lead large, ambiguous projects end-to-end: scope the problem, pick the approach, drive execution across multiple engineers, and ship to the fleet.
• Make and defend the build-vs-borrow, learn-vs-classical, and depth-vs-breadth decisions that shape what the team works on for the next year.
• Partner with engineering managers, product, and hardware on staffing, sequencing, and risk; serve as a senior technical voice in cross-functional planning.