Staff Autonomy Engineer

Brain Corp, San Diego, CA

The role

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.

All jobs

Staff Autonomy Engineer

Brain Corp, San Diego, CA

Posted pay

$210K–$262K

a year

Compared with similar jobs

This base pay is below the median for staff ML and AI engineering jobs in other US places.

Median: $249K a year
Other jobs in the group: 97

We compare the middle of each posted range. This is base pay as posted. The group does not include this job.

Location: San Diego, CA
Work type: Not given
Level: Staff
Experience: 7+ years
Skills in the job text: Python
C++
PyTorch
CUDA
JAX
Linux
ROS
Posted: Jul 25, 2026
Last check: 7 h ago
Job type: ML / AI engineering, Inference & ML systems

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Brain Corp

Open tech jobs: 8
With posted pay: 75%
Median posted base: $183K–$229K

About Brain Corp: funding, hiring and pay

Brain Corp

About Brain Corp: funding, hiring and pay

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The role

What you need

Education and/or Work Experience Requirements

Master’s Degree. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent demonstrated experience.
7+ years of industry experience in embodied AI (robotics, self-driving, drones, or similar), with at least some of that time in a senior or lead capacity.
Deep expertise in two or more of: machine learning, SLAM and state estimation, robotic perception, motion planning.
Strong fluency in C++ and Python in a Linux environment.
Demonstrated history of taking research ideas into production at meaningful scale.

Required Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, and Other Characteristics

Deep, hands-on expertise with PyTorch (and/or JAX), modern training infrastructure, and contemporary architectures (transformers, diffusion models, VLA/foundation models).
Extensive experience designing robotic systems with ROS 2 (or comparable middleware) and modern simulation environments such as Isaac Sim, MuJoCo, or Gazebo.
Strong record of shipping ML-driven features to production hardware — including the post-launch reality of monitoring, debugging weird failure modes, rollback, and on-call.
Excellent systems and architectural judgment; able to defend a position and equally able to update it when the evidence changes.
Modern software engineering fundamentals: CI/CD, code review culture, observability, and iterative delivery.
Excellent written and verbal communication — design docs that set direction, talks that bring people along, and code that other engineers want to read.
Bonus: experience with on-device acceleration (TensorRT, ONNX, custom CUDA kernels), large-scale data infra, or leading distributed teams.
Bonus:Track record of research impact (publications at venues like CoRL, RSS, ICRA, NeurIPS, CVPR, ICML — or open-source equivalents) and of converting research into product.

Physical Demands

Work Environment

The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. The noise level in the work environment is usually quiet to moderate. Employees are exposed to the typical office environment with computers, printers and telephones.

Staff Autonomy Engineer

The role

Staff Autonomy Engineer

The role

What you need

Education and/or Work Experience Requirements

Required Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, and Other Characteristics

Physical Demands

Work Environment

Technical Leadership and Direction

Technical Excellence

Mentorship, Hiring, and Culture

Pay and benefits

In addition to base pay, our competitive total rewards package consists of

Additional Perks include

About Brain Corp

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