Perception Lead Engineer

Palo Alto, CA / Ann Arbor, MI / Product & Technology - AD/ADAS / Employee / hybrid

Woven by Toyota is enabling Toyota’s once-in-a-century transformation into a mobility company. Inspired by a legacy of innovating for the benefit of others, our mission is to challenge the current state of mobility through human‑centric innovation — expanding what “mobility” means and how it serves society.

Our work centers on four pillars: AD/ADAS, our autonomous driving and advanced driver assist technologies;
Arene, our software development platform for software‑defined vehicles;
Woven City, a test course for mobility; and Cloud & AI, the digital infrastructure powering our collaborative foundation. Business‑critical functions empower these teams to execute, and together, we’re working toward one bold goal: a world with zero accidents and enhanced well‑being for all.

TEAM

Woven by Toyota's AD/ADAS organization is developing the core algorithms for safe and robust driving of complex and uncertain real‑world environments. Our teams are contributing to next‑generation autonomy and ADAS active safety systems through core algorithms, data‑driven approaches, and efficient architectures. The Behavior Department within AD/ADAS is responsible for accelerating ML and AI technology to deliver state‑of‑the‑art and safe vehicle behaviors.

Working across the spectrum of active safety and L2‑L4 autonomy, the team delivers core technology in the areas of perception, planning, control, and HMI towards production targets with Toyota.

WHO ARE WE LOOKING FOR?

We are seeking a Lead Engineer to serve as the right‑hand partner (to work in hand) to the head of World Understanding to drive the roadmap, architecture, metrics, and technical strategy for software components contributing to understanding around the vehicle. A system thinker with technical depth in machine learning approaches to complex systems. This engineer will accelerate the adoption of data‑driven and deep learning methodologies, focusing on ML system design and verification, supervised/unsupervised learning, multi‑modality, multi‑tasks training, and temporal/sequential modeling.

This role emphasizes faster and more cost‑efficient model iteration, data‑driven validation strategies, and unlocking new safety/performance capabilities through advanced ML.

The role also requires strong communication skills, an aptitude for mentoring tech leads, influencing and collaborating with diverse stakeholders, including TMC, in identifying deep technical challenges, developing solutions, and executing on the delivery of our autonomy mission.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Driving the technical vision and multi‑year strategy for World Understanding (including perception, mapping, fusion, on‑board/off‑board) software.

• Leading project execution, defining efficient engineering processes, and mitigating risks.

• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams such as Data, Behavior (Planner/Controller/HMI), Developer Ecosystem, and Product Delivery while influencing technical decisions across the organization to drive innovation, ensure seamless system integration, and improve overall engineering efficiency.

• Develop state‑of‑the‑art models to deliver desired driving environments in various sensor configurations.

• Increase speed of the component‑ and system‑level model iteration while maintaining cost efficiency.

• Incorporate data‑driven approaches to improve system performance and unlock new capabilities for safety.

• Maintain the functional architecture design and lead review of technical designs.

• Drive organizational metrics towards performance, safety, and quality.

• Maintain external presence of the department through papers, patents, and presentations.

• Assess and mitigate risk to the technical program.

• Act in partnership with other Lead Engineers in AD/ADAS to solve high impact cross‑functional issues.

• Mentor and support engineers, fostering growth through code reviews, knowledge sharing, and collaboration with cross‑functional teams to align technical solutions with business goals.

• Design reusable software components as part of an integrated system.

• Understand and fulfill the software practices that…