Senior/Staff Research Engineer – Learnable Planner

About the role

Waabi is seeking a Senior or Staff Research Engineer to advance its Learnable Planner within the Motion Planning team. You will help integrate state‑of‑the‑art AI technologies into the autonomy stack that powers fully driverless trucks.

Key responsibilities

• Integrate cutting‑edge ML models into the production planning stack, from development through validation, deployment and monitoring.
• Develop interfaces and pipelines in Waabi World, the high‑fidelity simulator, to test prototype and production planning models.
• Collaborate with motion‑planning sub‑teams and research scientists to evolve the planner architecture and create rich representations for end‑to‑end solutions.
• Champion engineering excellence by writing high‑quality, well‑structured, and thoroughly tested code.
• Work with large, multi‑source datasets and contribute to research publications and the company blog.

Required profile

• MS/PhD (or exceptional Bachelor’s) in machine learning, computer science, engineering or a related field.
• Experience with ML‑based or classical planning/decision‑making techniques such as imitation learning, reinforcement learning, optimization, search or probabilistic reasoning.
• Strong passion for turning research ideas into practical, real‑world solutions.
• Collaborative mindset and willingness to help teammates.
• Solid understanding of computing fundamentals and code efficiency.

Required skills

• Proficiency in Python, Rust, C++ and/or CUDA.
• Experience with deep‑learning frameworks, especially PyTorch.
• Knowledge of model compilation and deployment tools such as TensorRT.
• Ability to handle large datasets and integrate them into simulation pipelines.