Principal Engineer - AV Labs

About the role and team

Uber is launching AV Labs to accelerate the autonomous technology ecosystem. We're building out a high-velocity team of multi-disciplinary experts to turn real-world operations into high-quality data for our autonomous partners. This team is focused on the hardest problem in AV today: unlocking real-world, long-tail driving data. Autonomy is now a data race—and Uber has an edge: We collect rare, real-world driving data at a scale and capital efficiency no one else can match.

As a Principal Engineer, you will be at the forefront of Physical AI, building advanced autonomy systems and architectures to add rich semantics to our massive driving data. You will set the technical direction for the development and implementation of foundational algorithms, onboard/offboard systems, and data pipelines that enable better data mining, deep scene understanding, and causal modeling of ego vehicle behavior. You aren't just solving known problems; you are identifying the next generation of challenges in AV, designing the architectural foundations to solve them, and raising the bar for technical excellence across the entire engineering organization.

What you’ll do

Strategic Technical Vision: Lead the overarching technical strategy for AV Labs' engineering initiatives. Set the roadmap for complex algorithms, data platforms, and autonomy infrastructure that extract high-fidelity semantic meaning from urban edge cases to enrich our L4 data lake.

Architecture & System Design: Provide the overarching technical vision for managing upstream sensor dependencies, evaluating large-scale simulation frameworks, and modeling real-world behavior.

Technical Mentorship & Influence: Mentor senior, staff, and lead engineers, fostering a culture of rigorous experimentation and engineering excellence. You will serve as a technical standard-bearer and influence the architectural direction of multiple teams.

Platform Evolution: Define the requirements for high-quality large evaluation datasets, objective performance metrics, and the ultimate data mining engine that empowers autonomous partners to query and extract precise edge cases.

Cross-Organizational Leadership: Act as a critical bridge between AV Labs and other Uber engineering units to ensure our core architectures, evaluation platforms, and autonomous technologies are successfully integrated and deployed.

Basic Qualifications

• 10+ years of working experience in the Software Engineering, Robotics, or Autonomous Systems industry.
• Proven experience leading large-scale technical projects from conception to production.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or related fields.
• Expert-level proficiency in Python, C++, or similar languages in Linux environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD or MS degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, or a related highly technical field.
• Extensive experience with C++, CUDA, and high-performance system optimization for onboard systems or massive offline datasets.
• Deep understanding of autonomous system architectures, sensor data pipelines, robot middleware (e.g., ROS), and offline evaluation simulation.
• Experience building and scaling foundational architectures for physical world interaction, large-scale data evaluation, or autonomy infrastructure.
• Recognized expertise in the field (e.g., relevant patents, open-source contributions, or publications).
• For Sunnyvale, CA-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD $302,000 per year - USD $336,000 per year.
• You will be eligible to participate in Uber's bonus program, and may be offered an equity award & other types of comp. All full-time employees are eligible to participate in a 401(k) plan. You will also be eligible for various benefits.