Data Engineer (SE / Sr SE)
At a glance
Senior Data Engineering role at PlusAI. Santa Clara · full-time · $130,000–$200,000 base.
dataroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Define measures for safety, comfort, progress, interventions and compliance, then calculate them across fleet and simulation data
- Build pipelines that evaluate driving performance consistently at fleet scale
- Examine road-test and simulation results for behavior trends, regressions and anomalies, then give engineering teams actionable findings
- Use map-matched measures, route performance and event locations to show where the virtual driver succeeds or struggles
- Create release comparisons, readiness checks and traceable evidence, and automate issue triage through root-cause attribution and proposed fixes
What you bring
- A computer science, engineering or related technical degree, or equivalent hands-on experience
- Strong Python skills and experience creating scalable data-processing systems or evaluation frameworks
- Experience defining and validating measures, analyzing large time-series, event or geospatial datasets, and checking errors
- Experience building LLM-based or agent-driven workflows for analysis, evaluation or automation
- Clear technical communication, independent problem-solving and ownership of work from start to finish
Who this fits
This role suits an engineer from data, analytics, geospatial, evaluation or robotics work who can take open-ended problems from analysis through delivery. Autonomous-vehicle experience is helpful but not required, and candidates may be considered at Engineer or Software Engineer level. The position is hybrid in Santa Clara.
From the employer
Knowing how well our virtual driver drives — and why it fell short — is what lets us ship with confidence. In this role, you will own that loop end to end: the metrics that quantify driving performance, the pipelines that compute them at fleet scale, the analysis that turns them into judgments about autonomy behavior — including where on the map that behavior changes — the data and tooling that gate software releases, and the agentic workflows that take a detected issue from triage to a proposed fix. You will work primarily in Python across large-scale data processing, geospatial analytics, evaluation frameworks, and LLM-powered automation. We welcome engineers from data engineering, analytics, geospatial, evaluation, or robotics backgrounds; prior autonomous-vehicle experience is helpful but not required.
We are open to candidates at either the Engineer or Software Engineer level. Level will be determined by experience, technical depth, scope of ownership, and demonstrated impact. You do not need experience with every technology in our stack; we value strong fundamentals, ownership, and the ability to learn.
Responsibilities:
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Define and compute driving performance metrics — covering safety, comfort, progress, interventions, and compliance — and build the scalable pipelines that evaluate them consistently across fleet and simulation data
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Analyze road-test and simulation data in depth to identify trends, regressions, and anomalies in autonomy behavior, and turn them into clear findings that engineering teams act on
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Build geospatial analytics over fleet driving data: map-matched metrics, route and corridor performance, location-based clustering of events and issues, and geographic coverage analysis that shows where the virtual driver performs well and where it struggles
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Build the data foundations and tooling for release management, including release-over-release comparisons, readiness and gating criteria, and traceable evidence supporting release decisions
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Build AI agentic workflows that triage detected issues at scale — clustering and deduplicating failures, attributing root cause, routing to the right owners, and proposing fixes with supporting evidence for engineering review
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Ensure that your work is performed in accordance with the company's Quality Management System (QMS) requirements and contribute to continuous improvement efforts
Required Skills:
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BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
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Proficiency in Python, with experience building scalable data processing systems or evaluation frameworks
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Experience developing metrics and analyzing large-scale time-series, event, or geospatial data, including principled metric definitions, validation, and error analysis
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Experience building LLM-powered or agentic workflows for data analysis, evaluation, or automation
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Ability to solve open-ended technical challenges and communicate findings clearly to engineering and program stakeholders
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Self-driven with a strong sense of ownership: a quick learner who is eager to take responsibility and drive projects forward end to end
Preferred Skills:
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Experience with distributed data processing such as Apache Spark, and workflow orchestration such as Airflow or Argo Workflows
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Familiarity with LLM agent frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph, or similar) and prompt/tool-orchestration patterns
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Experience with geospatial data and tooling, such as GIS formats, map matching, spatial indexing and joins, PostGIS, GeoPandas, or map-based visualization libraries
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Experience with release engineering, quality gating, or automated regression detection
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Experience with autonomous vehicles, robotics, or other safety-critical systems
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Experience building dashboards or analytics interfaces that expose metrics to users