Engineering Manager: ML Data & Evaluation Autonomy

Engineer Manager - ML Data and Evaluation, Self-Driving Systems

Sunnyvale, California, United States

Applied Intuition, Inc. is powering the future of physical AI. Founded in 2017 and now valued at $15 billion, the Silicon Valley company is creating the digital infrastructure needed to bring intelligence to every moving machine on the planet. Applied Intuition services the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining and agriculture industries in three core areas: tools and infrastructure, operating systems, and autonomy.

Eighteen of the top 20 global automakers, as well as the United States military and its allies, trust the company’s solutions to deliver physical intelligence. Applied Intuition is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Washington, D.C.;
San Diego;
Ft. Walton Beach, Florida;
Ann Arbor, Michigan;
London;
Stuttgart;
Munich;
Stockholm;
Bangalore;
Seoul; and Tokyo.

We are an in-office company, and our expectation is that employees primarily work from their Applied Intuition office 5 days a week. However, we also recognize the importance of flexibility and trust our employees to manage their schedules responsibly. This may include occasional remote work, starting the day with morning meetings from home before heading to the office, or leaving earlier when needed to accommodate family commitments.

Applied Intuition builds autonomy software deployed on real vehicles across multiple continents - passenger cars, trucks, mining vehicles, and defense platforms. The business is profitable, growing fast, and deeply embedded with OEMs globally.

We are looking for an Engineering Manager to own the data and evaluation layer that powers our end‑to‑end autonomy models. This role covers what the industry typically staffs as separate orgs: data enrichment and autolabeling, dataset curation and corpus management, evaluation and metrics infrastructure, and the closed‑loop systems that connect on‑road performance back to training. Here it’s one organization under one leader, serving ADAS, L4 trucking, mining, and off‑road from a common pipeline.

Model iteration speed is gated by how fast you close the loop. This team owns the pace. You will be hands‑on in the technical decisions and close enough to the models to know when something is off.

• Own data enrichment: the ML pipelines that produce semantic labels, object annotations, behavior tags, and derived features at petabyte scale across cameras, lidar, and radar. Ensure enrichment quality keeps pace with model requirements as they evolve.
• Build the curation and corpus management systems: distribution analysis, targeted mining for long‑tail scenarios, embedding‑based data selection, scenario diversity and geographic balance enforcement.
• Own evaluation from off‑board metrics to on‑road driving quality. Define the metrics, benchmarks, and regression tests that determine whether a model ships. Close the sim‑to‑real gap. Build “eval of eval” tooling to measure and improve the evaluation system itself.
• Recruit, develop, and technically lead the team. Build a culture of rigor on a safety‑critical system.

• 5+ years building ML or data systems for robotics or production software systems.
• 2+ years managing or technically leading engineering teams.
• Experience with large‑scale data pipelines: ingestion, curation, and processing of large‑scale multi‑modal sensor data.
• Experience reasoning about dataset composition, distribution balance, and corpus‑level quality – making data decisions that measurably improved model performance.
• Strong software engineering in Python; comfort with C++ and distributed systems.

• Shipped perception, prediction, or planning models to production vehicles.
• Experience with state‑of‑the‑art simulation for ML eval (e.g. neural rendering and simulation).
• Labeling and auto‑labeling pipelines: automated pre‑labeling, quality verification, human‑in‑the‑loop workflows.
• RL and reward engineering for autonomous driving or robotics.

Compensation at Applied Intuition for eligible roles includes base salary, equity,…