We’re Cruise, the self-driving ride-hailing service.

We are building the world’s most advanced, all-electric, self-driving cars to safely connect people to the places, things, and experiences they care about. We believe self-driving cars will help save lives, reimagine cities, redefine time in transit, and restore freedom of movement for many.

At Cruise, our engineers have opportunities to grow and develop while learning from leaders at the cutting-edge of their fields. With a culture of internal mobility, there's opportunity to thrive in a variety of disciplines. This is a place for dreamers and doers to succeed.

If you are looking to solve one of today’s most complex engineering challenges, see the results of your work in hundreds of self-driving cars, and make a positive impact in the world starting in our cities, join us.

About the role: 

The Simulation group delivers products that accelerate our autonomous vehicle development, testing, and deployment through specialized frameworks and tools. As an Engineering Manager of the NPC AI team, you will lead a team building efficient entity behavior systems at scale and creating efficient frameworks to simulate a realistic living world across multiple simulation systems. You will be responsible for ensuring the behaviors for NPCs (Non-player characters: cars, pedestrians, bicycles, etc) clearly map to analysis requirements and provide engineers a clear signal on how a software change affects vehicle behavior.

Day-to-day responsibilities include:

• Research and implement multiple approaches to realistic imitation of real-world driving and pedestrian behaviors for use in simulation
• Coordinate with stakeholders to ensure the project stays in scope and focused on customer facing deliverables with clear abstractions and APIs
• Create and improve data pipelines for evaluating simulated behaviors against real world observation data
• Hire, mentor, and motivate the best engineers responsible for designing, developing, and supporting systems that will replicate a realistic living world inside of our simulation frameworks
• Work with senior leadership, product managers and technical program managers to create and execute on a roadmap for your team to ensure efficient delivery of products
• Continuously and transparently track and report your team’s progress to senior leadership and stakeholders
• Define and measure the output goals and KPIs your team will use to measure success
• Conduct performance reviews, identify top performers, and support their growth into engineering management or technical leadership
• Work side-by-side with engineering leadership and QA to set and follow high quality testing procedures and processes

You should apply for this role if you have the following qualifications:

• Passion for safe, fully-electric, self-driving technology and its impact on the world
• Ability to lead with cross-functional communication and collaboration skills
• Excellent modern C++ coding abilities, with strong system fundamentals and a focus on unit testing
• 2+ years experience managing an engineering team of ~ 3 to 8 engineers focused on building and supporting performant, scalable, cloud-based production systems
• 8+ years experience in high performance, distributed software engineering, 3D video game engineering, robotics, or similar
• Experience as a hiring manager, recruiting and retaining the best talent
• Ability to learn quickly, starting with little information and quickly becoming an expert in your domain
• Proven success in detail-oriented test plan design and execution
• Clear track record of effective collaboration with customers and continuous delivery of quality results
• Possess a creative problem solving and continuous improvement mindset which leaves everything you touch better that it was before
• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Robotics, or equivalent experience

Bonus points!

• Experience in computer simulation, including video games and vehicle simulation software
• Experience with fast-growth companies and recruiting/retaining the best talent