Principal AI Engineer, Vay
Autonomy
+ ESOP stock options
More information about location
Driverless mobility service
Open for applications
Driverless mobility service
101-200 employees
Open for applications
+ ESOP stock options
More information about location
101-200 employees
Company mission
To speed up the rollout of driverless mobility services by using its remote human-assisted driving technologies to build trust in its services.
Role
Who you are
- You are a Principal level engineer who enjoys owning complex AI systems end to end, from research through to production deployment, who wants to see their work operating in the real world
- You have considerable previous experience building and deploying end-to-end ML models in autonomous driving, robotics, or a closely related domain
- You hold a MSc/PhD in Computer Science, Computer Vision, Robotics or a closely related field
- Hands-on experience in applying Machine Learning to 3D traffic scene understanding
- Proficiency in Machine Learning frameworks like PyTorch or Tensorflow
- Strong experience programming with Python (C++ is nice to have)
- You enjoy bridging research quality work with production readiness and performance constraints
- We welcome applications from all backgrounds and experiences. If you’re excited about shaping something truly groundbreaking, we’d be happy to hear from you 💨
What the job involves
- As a Principal AI Engineer, you will work on cutting edge Physical AI and tackle one of the hardest real-world problems - creating intelligent systems that navigate complex, unpredictable environments safely and reliably
- You will get to work on and scale models with massive datasets, and push innovations in multimodal AI that directly translate to safer roads, reduced accidents, and transformative mobility for everyone
- The profound real-world impact, combined with rapid advancements and the thrill of solving "the ultimate challenge for AI in the physical world," makes this role incredibly rewarding and exciting
- You will be building Vay’s foundation model (end-to-end) for autonomous driving with the target to deploy it in our commercial fleet in Vegas with hundreds of vehicles in order to improve autonomy performance and unit economics
- In order to do that, you will:
- Research and develop state of the art foundation models for real-world autonomous driving
- Design and build end-to-end AI pipelines and data flywheels that continuously improve model performance
- Apply machine learning to 3D traffic scene understanding and multimodal sensor data
- Define and implement robust evaluation methods for real world driving conditions
- Optimizing models for efficient and scalable deployment on production hardware
- Collaborate closely with autonomy, data, and systems teams to bring models into production
Our take
Driverless cars are often considered as the future of transport, but the AI-driven innovation is not yet powerful and safe enough to be made publically available. Furthermore, it is anticipated that many people would not trust AI-driven driverless cars regardless of their state of development, preferring to know that a human is behind the wheel.
Vay develops autonomous driving hardware powered by "teledriving", a system in which cars are driven remotely by humans. The German company will begin by providing orderable cars that can be driven manually by the customer but parked remotely by Vay staff, with future use cases including full remote rides, ride-sharing, last-mile delivery, and public transport.
Whilst other companies such as Mobileye have made plans to provide driverless cars to German cities, Vay is standing out with its unique focus on the trust of teledriving. Furthermore, the initial focus on autonomous parking will greatly speed up rollout and give the company a competitive edge. 2024 funding is being used to expand its development team and grow its European market.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-1% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Nov 2025
$60m
LATE VC
Dec 2021
$95m
SERIES B
Total funding: $169.6m
Company benefits
- You will be part of a highly committed, experienced, fun and international team from over 25 countries
- You'll be a part of improving transportation in metropolitan areas around the world - from Europe
- We offer healthy snacks, drinks and coffee in our modern waterfront office in Hamburg
- We have a generous, highly employee-friendly stock option plan and pay above industry standards
- We organize thoughtful & fun team events throughout the year
- We support highly flexible working policies where possible as well as support for your relocation – it doesn’t matter where you currently live
- We contribute to a FitX or UrbanSportsClub membership, plus free and all-day use of our Gravity Gym in the Berlin office
- We contribute to your monthly public transport ticket in Berlin so that it costs you <50% of the regular price
Company HQ
Tempelhof, Berlin, Germany
Leadership
Thomas von der Ohe
(CEO & Co-Founder)Experience as Senior Technical Program Manager for Amazon Lab126 between 2014 and 2016. Technical Program Manager for Zoox Inc. between 2016 and 2018. Co-founded Vay as CEO in 2018.
Fabrizio Ugo Scelsi
(CTO & Co-Founder)Founded autonomous driving company Mov.ING in 2014, acting as CTO until 2017.
Bogdan Djukic
(VP of Engineering & Co-Founder)Experience as a Senior Software Engineer for Microsoft between 2013 and 2017.
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