Research Assistant​/Associate; f​/m​/d Autonomous Driving - V000011523

Chair and Institute for Automotive Engineering

Organisation/Company Chair and Institute for Automotive Engineering Research Field Economics Researcher Profile First Stage Researcher (R1) Final date to receive applications 12 Oct 2026 - 21:59 (UTC) Country Germany Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Hours Per Week 39,83 hours/week Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme? Not funded by a EU programme Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure?

No

Our Profile

With 47,000 students and 10,000 staff, RWTH Aachen University is one of Europe’s most prestigious technical universities. As part of RWTH Aachen, the Institute of Automotive Engineering conducts research into the complete vehicle, including its systems and their interactions. From the initial idea through innovative component and system concepts right through to vehicle prototypes, the Institute’s staff are shaping the vehicle of the future and, in collaboration with car manufacturers and suppliers, tackling current and significant challenges.

Connected and automated driving will play a decisive role in shaping the future of mobility. Within the Vehicle Intelligence & Automated Driving research area, the Institute brings together the necessary expertise – from conceptualisation through system and functional development to verification and validation – for the realisation of connected and automated vehicles and their functions. In doing so, equal consideration is given to all aspects of the interplay between sustainability, safety and the mobility experience.

To this end, the research division researches and develops methods and tools for use both in simulation and in real vehicles. Thanks to its comprehensive research infrastructure, forward-looking research questions can be addressed efficiently and with substantive expertise, either in direct bilateral projects or within the framework of government-funded research. The latest methods of artificial intelligence play a major role in this, as they are capable of solving the complex challenges of automated and connected mobility with a high degree of reliability and in a way that is comprehensible to humans.

The research division boasts state-of-the-art infrastructure. Among other things, it has at its disposal research vehicles for use on public roads, in-house developed vehicle prototypes for implementing innovative research approaches, infrastructure test beds, scenario data points and a unique simulator centre. The latter comprises various simulator test benches, ranging from pedestrian and cyclist simulators and static driving simulators to a highly dynamic driving simulator – the only one of its kind freely available in Germany.

Your duties and responsibilities

• You design and support large-scale field trials of automated driving functions in public road traffic
• You develop metrics and evaluation methods that allow driving performance and safety to be assessed objectively
• You establish a robust human baseline as a benchmark for autonomous driving
• You build data pipelines for the acquisition, preparation and analysis of large volumes of driving data
• You translate your results into systematic safety arguments and contribute them to standardization, regulation and international publications

Skills/Qualifications

• Completed college degree (Master's degree or equivalent) in mechanical engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, data science or a comparable discipline
• Interest in automotive engineering and automated driving
• Confident handling of data: statistics, data analysis, working with large datasets
• Programming skills in Python and/or C/C++
• Independent, reliable and systematic way of working
• Very…