Principal Software Engineer - Autonomy Behavior Validation

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About the role

Job Description Principal Software Engineer - Autonomy Behavior Validation The Role As a Principal Software Engineer in the Autonomy Behavior Validation team, you will set the technical direction for turning safety and behavior requirements into a production-grade counterfactual simulation product. You will build a capability that turns real incidents and simulation scenarios into trustworthy engineering evidence for developers, release decisions, and launch decisions. This includes scene reconstruction, implementation of safety-defined attentive-human benchmarks, human and other road-user response models, counterfactual simulation following intervention, controlled scene variation, outcome and severity estimation, and the validation needed to understand when a result is credible enough to support a decision. You will partner with Safety and other stakeholders to define and refine requirements and benchmark definitions, then turn them into scalable, auditable, and repeatable simulation workflows. What You’ll Do • Set the technical strategy and architecture for counterfactual behavior evaluation, including operationalizing safety-defined attentive-human benchmarks, counterfactual simulation following human intervention, alternate-policy comparisons, and controlled scene perturbations. • Lead the conversion of real incidents and simulation events into executable, provenance-preserving scenarios with enough fidelity, repeatability, and uncertainty characterization to support engineering and safety decisions. • Implement and validate human and other road-user response models against agreed benchmarks and requirements, including perception and reaction timing, maneuver selection, vehicle dynamics, and the range of plausible outcomes. • Define and deploy scalable pipelines for parameter extraction, scene reconstruction, counterfactual swaps, fuzzing, simulation execution, outcome estimation, and analysis of large scenario sets. • Establish how the counterfactual product and its outputs are validated, including comparison to baseline runs, replay and closed-course evidence, model limitations, confidence, traceability to requirements, and appropriate use of results. • Lead work across Behavior, Simulation, Safety, Human Factors, Legal, Product, and Operations, turning complex results into clear engineering actions, safety-case evidence, and release recommendations. Required Qualifications • Master’s degree in systems engineering, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, robotics, human factors, or a related field. • 10 or more years of professional experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, vehicle development, simulation, systems engineering, human factors, or safety-critical validation. • A proven record of evaluating autonomous vehicles for a commercial fleet, launch, supervised release, or other high-consequence product decision. • Strong understanding of human behavior modeling, driver response, perception and reaction time, vehicle dynamics, uncertainty, and the limits of model-based conclusions. • Deep experience building or leading counterfactual, replay, crash reconstruction, incident analysis, or comparable simulation-based evaluation capabilities. • Professional experience with simulation evaluation at scale, including scenario generation, parameter sweeps, distributed execution, reproducibility, data quality, and the trade-offs between fidelity, confidence, runtime, and cost. • Strong Python and agentic workflow experience. You should be comfortable designing and reviewing production-quality analysis, simulation, and validation software and using code to investigate an engineering question quickly. • Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the abilit

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