Senior Engineering Manager, Active Sensors (LiDAR)

Title: Engineering Manager, Active Sensors (LiDAR) Location: Remote, U.S, Ann Arbor, MI, Fort Worth, TX, Blacksburg, VA

About the Company

At Torc, we have always believed that autonomous vehicle technology will transform how we travel, move freight, and do business.

A leader in autonomous driving since 2007, Torc has spent over a decade commercializing our solutions with experienced partners. Now a part of the Daimler family, we are focused solely on developing software for automated trucks to transform how the world moves freight.

Join us and catapult your career with the company that helped pioneer autonomous technology, and the first AV software company with the vision to partner directly with a truck manufacturer.

Meet the team

Torc’s Perception teams develop the production machine learning systems that enable our autonomous trucks to understand their surroundings. The Active Sensors team owns the end-to-end lidar perception pipeline, from motion compensation and point-cloud aggregation to multitask learned perception for object detection, road and lane understanding, 3D occupancy estimation for safe vehicle operations. These systems must run in real-time on embedded compute while remaining robust to adverse weather, sensor degradation, and sensor failures. The team works across machine learning, 3D perception, and embedded systems, balancing perception performance and robustness against latency, memory, power and on-board compute budget.

As the team’s Engineering Manager, you will lead development across the complete perception lifecycle, from data requirements and pipeline architecture through model training, evaluation, integration, deployment, and robotic testing. You will collaborate closely with teams across sensor hardware, data, infrastructure, simulation, compute platform, systems engineering, safety, perception, and planning.

What you'll do:

The Perception department is seeking an experienced and technically strong Engineering Manager to lead a machine learning team developing active sensor-based perception capabilities for our autonomous trucks.

You will be responsible for the team’s people leadership, technical direction, and execution. You will create an environment in which engineers can deliver high-quality results, advance the technology, and grow both individually and as a team. You will own roadmap planning, prioritization, and delivery while ensuring that the team’s commitments are clear, realistic, and aligned with the company milestones.

You will work within a broader organization of teams developing perception and behavior capabilities across the autonomous-driving stack. You will represent the team across the organization, collaborate with technical and cross-functional partners, and communicate progress, dependencies, and risks to senior leadership.

The role requires a leader who combines strong people management with technical depth and disciplined execution. You will remain sufficiently close to the team’s work to guide technical decisions and remove blockers while connecting its roadmap to the department’s broader mission of delivering production-grade machine learning systems for autonomous trucking.

• Lead, coach and develop a team of machine learning and software engineers, including hiring, performance management, career development, and continuous feedback.
• Set the technical direction, roadmap, and priorities for active-sensor perception in alignment with perception and vehicle-level milestones.
• Own the development and delivery of multitask models for object detection, road and lane detection, and free-space estimation using lidar and radar data.
• Guide architecture and design decisions involving shared backbones, task-specific representations, sensor fusion, temporal modeling, uncertainty estimation, and interactions among perception tasks.
• Ensure that improvements to one task do not introduce unacceptable regressions in other tasks or in downstream system behavior.
• Define the team’s strategy for maintaining consistent perception performance across adverse weather, changing environmental conditions, sensor degradation, and sensor failures.
• Drive model and system designs that support graceful degradation when sensor inputs are missing, degraded, delayed, or unreliable.
• Own delivery across the machine learning lifecycle, including data requirements, model development, experimentation, evaluation, integration, release, and monitoring.
• Ensure that training and evaluation datasets provide sufficient quality and coverage across operating conditions, geographic features, rare events, adverse weather, and sensor-failure modes.
• Establish rigorous task-level and system-level metrics, benchmarks, and failure-analysis practices covering precision, recall, range, latency, robustness, cross-task performance, and downstream impact.
• Review technical designs, model architectures, experimental results, training artifacts, and verification evidence to ensure that decisions are supported by data.
• Collaborate with teams across multimodal perception, prediction and planning, data, infrastructure, simulation, sensor hardware, embedded platforms, systems engineering, and safety.
• Track execution against commitments and communicate progress, risks, dependencies, and staffing needs to senior leadership.
• Maintain high engineering standards through design reviews, code and model reviews, reproducible experimentation, and clear release-readiness criteria.

What you’ll need to Succeed:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or related field with 6+ years of professional experience or a master's degree with 4+ years of experience. 
• 2+ years of experience leading and managing engineers, including coaching, performance management, and career development.
• Strong technical foundation in machine learning and computer vision, including 3D geometry, model evaluation, uncertainty, and perception failure modes.
• Experience developing and deploying production machine learning systems for autonomous driving, robotics, or another real-world application.
• Experience with one or more relevant areas, such as multitask learning, object detection, road and lane detection, or 3D occupancy estimation.
• Strong understanding of lidar sensing and its impact on perception, including scan patterns, reflectance, FMCW lidar, and sensor time synchronization.
• Experience across the machine learning lifecycle, including data curation, model training, controlled experimentation, offline evaluation, system integration, and production validation.
• Experience analyzing data distributions, dataset coverage, long-tail scenarios, and the relationship between training data and model performance.
• Strong proficiency in Python and PyTorch, along with practical experience using C++ in production perception or machine learning systems.
• Experience deploying and optimizing deep learning models using TensorRT, including evaluating tradeoffs among model performance, robustness, latency, memory, power, and hardware utilization.
• Strong understanding of embedded computing platforms and the constraints associated with deploying real-time perception systems.
• Experience defining technical roadmaps, planning complex machine learning projects, managing cross-functional dependencies, and delivering against program milestones.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical decisions, results, tradeoffs, and risks to both technical teams and senior leadership.

Bonus points!

• PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related field.
• Experience with relevant NVIDIA libraries and frameworks, such as CUDA, CuDNN, CuBLAS, NPP, developing custom TensorRT operations.
• Publications, patents, or open-source contributions in machine learning, computer vision, robotics, or autonomous driving.

Work Location: For this position, we are open to hiring in Ann Arbor, MI, Blacksburg, VA, Fort Worth, TX office work locations in a hybrid capacity. We are also open to hiring Remote in the United States.

Perks of Being a Full-time Torc’r

Torc cares about our team members and we strive to provide benefits and resources to support their health, work/life balance, and future. Our culture is collaborative, energetic, and team focused. Torc offers:

• A competitive compensation package that includes a bonus component and stock options
• 100% paid medical, dental, and vision premiums for full-time employees
• 401K plan with a 6% employer matchFlexibility in schedule and generous paid vacation (available immediately after start date)Company-wide holiday office closures
• AD+D and Life Insurance

At Torc, we’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace. We celebrate the uniqueness of our Torc’rs and do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, veteran status, or disabilities.

Even if you don’t meet 100% of the qualifications listed for this opportunity, we encourage you to apply.

Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several geographic markets. Pay is based on a number of factors and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Torc's total compensation package will also include our corporate bonus and stock option plan. Dependent on the position offered, sign-on payments, relocation, and other forms of compensation may be provided as part of a total compensation package, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits.

Job ID: 103010