Motion Planning Engineer

Source One is a consulting services company and we’re currently looking for the following individual to work as a consultant with our direct client, an on demand autonomous ride‑hauling company in Foster City, CA

No Third-Party, No Corp to Corp, No Sponsorship Now or Future

REQUIRED - Must Have MOTION PLANNING EXPERIENCE

Location:
Foster City, CA

Onsite (Mon-Fri, 30 + hours)

Contract Duration: 6-12 months, with likely extension

Pay Rate: $96.78 per hour (w2)

We are helping our client find a Software Engineer, Motion Planning to help maintain high standards of safety, vehicle readiness, and software and hardware quality across autonomous vehicle operations.

In this role, you’ll execute testing, review data, generate Zero Problem Tickets (ZPTs), and log findings. You’ll document known issues and identify new defects, creating Jira tickets and communicating results to engineering teams. This role requires flexibility to support operational schedules, including early mornings, evenings, overnights, and weekends as needed.

The ideal candidate is detail-oriented, safety-focused, and comfortable working in fast-paced, high-responsibility testing environments.

As a Software Engineer, Motion Planning, you'll:

Implement, debug, and test features and modifications to specific areas of driving behavior in our production code base.

Work closely with senior engineers to understand design specifications and deliver reliable, high-quality code.

Utilize our extensive backend tooling to run regression tests and validate your changes across various driving situations.

Participate in on-vehicle drive reviews, helping to collect data and generate actionable feedback on driving performance.

In this role, you will:
Implement, debug, and test features and modifications to specific areas of driving behavior in our production code base. Work closely with senior engineers to understand design specifications and deliver reliable, high-quality code. Utilize our extensive backend tooling to run regression tests and validate your changes across various driving situations. Participate in on-vehicle drive reviews, helping to collect data and generate actionable feedback on driving performance.

On the Motion Planning team at Zoox, you’ll be dedicated to improving the driving behaviors of the robot on public roads. The Planner's job is to figure out where the robot is going and how to get there safely in situations as complex as those found in Downtown San Francisco or on the Las Vegas Strip. This is a cutting-edge problem, which requires teamwork and collaboration across a broad set of experts spanning Planner, Perception, Prediction, Operations, and more.

Together, you will create the next generation of algorithmic improvements to expand our robot’s ability to drive in some of the most complex situations found on public roads. Safety is foundational at Zoox, so you will take a measured approach – develop a principled modification to the Planner, test in simulation and on closed courses, and team up with our safety drivers for on‑road testing.

Bonus

Qualifications:

Coursework or project experience in geometric and/or sampling-based planning algorithms. Experience with autonomous robots, simulation environments, or machine learning/data‑driven development processes. Experience with ROS, pose estimation, SLAM, probabilistic filtering, or CUDA.

Qualifications:

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related technical field. 0–5 years of professional experience in software development. Strong proficiency in C++. Familiarity with foundational concepts of motion planning and pathfinding techniques (e.g., A*, RRTs, PRMs). Experience with large-scale codebases, version control (e.g., Git), and software development workflows. Eagerness to learn and debug complex, real‑time systems.

30-minute Manager Zoom 1.5 hour panel interview On‑site portion for the panel interview required