Autonomy Engineer - Performance and Reliability

Who we are:

Glydways is reimagining what public transit can be. We believe that mobility is the gateway to opportunity—connecting people to housing, education, employment, commerce, and care. By making transportation more accessible, affordable, and sustainable, we empower communities to thrive and unlock economic and social prosperity.

Our mission is to revolutionize transit with a solution that delivers high capacity, exceptional user experiences, unmatched affordability, and minimal environmental impact.

The Glydways system is a groundbreaking network of carbon-neutral, interconnected transit pathways powered by standardized autonomous vehicles on dedicated roadways. Operating 24/7 with on-demand access, it offers personalized and efficient mobility—without the burden of heavy upfront infrastructure costs or ongoing taxpayer subsidies.

With Glydways, we’re building more than a transportation system; we’re creating a future where everyone, everywhere, has the freedom to move.

Meet the team:

You'll be joining a mission-driven autonomy engineering team focused on routing, planning, controls, and simulation for autonomous vehicles. Our work spans from centralized fleet planning to onboard vehicle decision-making, blending algorithmic rigor with practical system implementation. We are passionate about building reliable, real-world autonomy solutions that can scale. The team values thoughtful design, clear documentation, and strong collaboration across disciplines including infrastructure, localization, system engineering, and testing. We take pride in balancing deep technical expertise with a pragmatic approach to getting impactful solutions into production.

Roles & Responsibilities:

In this hands-on role, you’ll lead testing strategies across routing, planning, controls, and simulation. You'll collaborate closely with software developers to build robust software tests, improve testing infrastructure, and drive root cause analysis while helping deliver high-performing autonomy functions that directly impact the rider experience. 

• Design and implement testing strategies and evaluation frameworks for autonomy software systems.

• Develop observability tools and test hooks within autonomy algorithms to improve testability, introspection, and debugging.

• Build and maintain automated and manual test suites for simulation-based, system integration, and on-vehicle validation.

• Lead test plan design, drive defect triage and root cause analysis, and surface critical risks early in the development cycle. Make recommendations for system improvements.

• Increase test coverage for various autonomy behaviors and edge cases, with a focus on safety , robustness, and performance validation.

• Collaborate directly with autonomy developers, infrastructure engineers, and system designers to make testing more robust.

• Continuously improve test infrastructure, automation pipelines, and reporting tools to enable fast iteration, reproducibility, and actionable feedback.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related technical field.

• 3+ years of hands-on experience in software development and testing, with a focus on complex systems such as autonomy, robotics, or real-time control.

• Strong proficiency in C++, with demonstrated ability to write high-quality, testable, and maintainable code. Fluency with Python (pandas, pyspark, streamlit).

• Experience designing and implementing test plans, test frameworks, and automated testing pipelines for algorithmic software (e.g., routing, planning, control systems).

• Familiarity with scale testing: simulation, aggregated evaluation, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL), or cloud-based test environments.

• Understanding of autonomous vehicle algorithms (e.g., path planning, motion control, kinematics, state estimation) and their specific quality and observability challenges.

• Proven track record of driving root cause analysis, delivering robust fixes, and owning quality improvements across the full software lifecycle.

Glydways provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.