Software Engineer (Controls Algorithms)

Who are we?

Based in Oxford and with offices in Canada and the US, Oxa is an international startup founded in 2014 and scaling up rapidly (300+ Oxbots and growing).

As the global leader in our industry, we’re fuelled by a bold purpose: to make the Earth move better. From passenger shuttles to industrial vehicles, our operating system for Universal Autonomy™ is transforming the way people and goods are transported by enabling any vehicle, in any environment, to operate autonomously — safely, securely and efficiently.

Our technology is capturing investors’ imagination. To date we’ve raised $140 million in our Series C investment round. Accommodating growing demand from new and current shareholders, this funding is driving our expansion in North America and EMEA, and accelerating the deployment of our technology in domains where there is both urgent need and potential to scale.

Your Team

You will join our Controls team, where we design, implement, test and deploy the systems that translates trajectories into commands to be executed on the fleet of Oxa Autonomous Vehicles (AVs).

Your Role

As a Controls Engineer, you will be responsible for the closed-loop trajectory following behaviour of Oxa’s AVs for accurate and safe manoeuvre execution. Working in conjunction with upstream Planning functions, this role will focus on designing, implementing, testing, and deploying control algorithms for diverse platforms that ensure that our AVs exhibit smooth, comfortable and precise behaviours during manoeuvre execution.

In this role, you will:

• Contribute to hiring and onboarding at scale by defining role responsibilities and requirements, leading interviews, engaging in recruiting outreach for your team, and mentoring and developing new team members
• Collaborate with the Planning team to ensure Smooth, Comfortable, Precise manoeuvre execution
• Influence technical strategy within the Controls Family, ensuring alignment with your Family Lead and your counterparts in other teams
• Contribute significantly to the engineering lifecycle, including scoping, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance of your team's work
• Contribute to the development of high quality functionality that allow Controls to be used as a building block for on-vehicle capabilities
• Positively impact product quality, customer experience, and maintainability, and take on projects that improve team processes and solutions
• Collaborate with your Team Lead and team members to develop, integrate and deploy optimisation-based controllers such as MPC, adaptive control and system identification
• Document and train others on your team's work, focus on improving features, and understand the business and customer value of your team's work
• Create appropriate metrics and tools to measure and benchmark the performance of controllers deployed on various AV platforms
• Work with customers, stakeholders, and peers to ensure the right solutions are delivered, and actively contribute to resolving disagreements through constructive dialog

Requirements

What you need to succeed:

• Hands-on experience with optimisation-based controllers (MPC, LQR)
• Experience with modelling of dynamic systems (vehicle modelling)
• Knowledge of adaptive control / system identification
• A Bachelor’s degree in a related field (Control Eng, Mech Eng, Aerospace, Robotics, Mechatronics) may be acceptable with appropriate experience
• A Master’s degree in a related field (Control Eng, Mech Eng, Aerospace, Robotics, Mechatronics) is desired
• Experience with C++ algorithm development and deployment

Extra kudos if you have any experience of:

• Hands-on experience with deploying controllers at scale or commercialisation of controllers
• Experience with Model reference adaptive controllers (MRACs) and Model identification adaptive controllers (MIACs)
• A customer-centric outlook. Chances are you won’t be directly customer facing, but we value people who anticipate and prioritise the needs of our customers. We call it ‘inventing on their behalf.’
• Experience with data analysis
• Experience with offset-free MPC/Disturbance Estimation
• Proven agility in fast-changing environments. As a scale-up, we’re constantly evolving so our people need to evolve too for us to succeed together

The Candidate Journey: Multi-Step and Two-Way

No-one wants to feel like a square peg in a round hole, so this process is designed to give you every chance to get the measure of us, and us of you. The various stages give you every opportunity to show your unique strengths and qualities, and enables each of us to establish if we’re a good fit for the other. If the fit is good and you’re selected, you’re then in a position to do great work and thrive, which is what everyone wants.

Benefits

We provide:

• Competitive salary, benchmarked against the market and reviewed annually
• Employee Assistance Program
• Hybrid working arrangements
• AD&D Insurance
• Long Term Disability Insurance
• Extended Health Care
• Life Insurance
• Personal Spending Account
• Dental Cover
• Health Spending Account
• Critical Illness Cover

Our Culture

We believe that diversity of thought and experience is a key driver of innovation. It also makes life, and work, more interesting. So ours is a culture that celebrates humanity in all its diversity and richness, and uses difference as fuel to grow and succeed together. Everyone is welcome, everyone has a voice, everyone is valued. And our work and people are all the better for it.

Learn more about our culture here.

Why become an Oxbot?

Our team of experts in computer science, AI, robotics and machine learning is world-class, and together they’re solving the most exciting and important technological challenges of our times.

But as well as smarts, Oxbots have heart. Our diverse, multi-cultural crew is guided by a shared vision to bring the myriad benefits of autonomy to our customers and partners. And in a company that celebrates uniqueness as much as skill and experience, they do it with energy, conviction and a healthy dose of excitement, too.

If you are bold, creative and hyper skilled, come and create the future of autonomy with us at Oxa.