Applied Technical Lead for controls at Applied Intuition owns the full lifecycle of the controls stack for autonomous vehicle platforms. This includes designing controllers from low-level actuation to high-level trajectory tracking.
Responsibilities
As a technical lead for controls, you will own the technical direction of our controls stack across its full lifecycle — from 0→1 development on new vehicle platforms to hardening, calibrating, and scaling controllers across production fleets. The systems you lead are high performance and safety-critical, operating under tight timing constraints on real machines in the field.
This role spans the full controls stack: low-level actuation and vehicle characterization on one end, and high-level trajectory tracking — both lateral and longitudinal. We work on a variety of different vehicle platforms: haul trucks, excavators, wheel loaders, dozers, and other heavy equipment across construction, mining, and agriculture.
In addition to your technical leadership, you will mentor and grow the existing controls team, set priorities across competing work streams, and set the standard for best practices. We move fast and we focus on excellence, for our products and for our business. If you are hands-on and looking for a place to have a multiplying effect on making autonomous systems a reality, Applied Intuition is the place for you!
At Applied Intuition, you will:
Set the technical direction for the controls stack across both 0→1 platform bring-up and production programs, and see designs through from prototype to deployed fleet
Design and implement controllers at every level of the stack, from low-level actuator control to lateral and longitudinal trajectory tracking
Design safe, redundant control systems that live within a safety-critical environment.
Characterize the dynamics of customer vehicles across many embodiments — haul trucks, excavators, wheel loaders, dozers, and more — to create tailored controls solutions and close the gap between simulation and real-world behavior
Build calibration and vehicle characterization workflows that scale controls performance from a single prototype to fleets of vehicles without per-vehicle hand-tuning
Lead, mentor, and grow the existing controls team; set priorities, unblock engineers, and raise the technical bar through design reviews and hands-on collaboration
Evaluate and apply academic research to create optimal-control-based solutions using techniques like nonlinear MPC and MPPI control
Collaborate with customers' engineers in construction, mining, and agriculture, and manage those relationships through field deployments
Qualification
MSc or PhD in mechanical engineeringExperience writing safety-critical
Preferred
MSc or PhD in mechanical engineering, robotics, or computer science with coursework or research experience in controls
Experience writing safety-critical, high-performance software using modern C++
Experience in quadratic programming and nonlinear optimization to create robust and performant controllers
Experience with heavy equipment or off-road platforms in construction, mining, or agriculture
Experience building calibration pipelines or system identification tooling used across a fleet
