Autonomy Test Engineer

About the role

Applied Intuition, Inc. is powering the future of physical AI. Founded in 2017 and now valued at $15 billion, the Silicon Valley company is creating the digital infrastructure needed to bring intelligence to every moving machine on the planet. Applied Intuition services the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining and agriculture industries in three core areas: tools and infrastructure, operating systems, and autonomy. Eighteen of the top 20 global automakers, as well as the United States military and its allies, trust the company’s solutions to deliver physical intelligence. Applied Intuition is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Washington, D.C.; San Diego; Ft. Walton Beach, Florida; Ann Arbor, Michigan; London; Stuttgart; Munich; Stockholm; Bangalore; Seoul; and Tokyo. Learn more at applied.co http://applied.co.

We are an in-office company, and our expectation is that full-time employees primarily work from their Applied Intuition office 5 days a week. However, we also recognize the importance of flexibility and trust our employees to manage their schedules responsibly. This may include occasional remote work, starting the day with morning meetings from home before heading to the office, or leaving earlier when needed to accommodate family commitments. This in-office expectation does not apply to contractor positions

ABOUT THE ROLE

As an Autonomy Test Engineer, you will own the verification of our autonomy software on real vessels. You’ll design and execute test scenarios that exercise autonomous behaviors (navigation, collision avoidance, mission planning, fault handling), analyze the resulting data to determine whether the autonomy did the right thing and why, and give the engineering team precise, reproducible findings. Much of the actual testing happens at sea, but the job is evaluating autonomy performance, not operating vessels.

You’ll help bridge the gap between cutting-edge R&D and mission-proven capability, ensuring our autonomous surface vehicles are performant, reliable, and safe in the most demanding environments on Earth.

AT APPLIED, YOU WILL:

- Design test scenarios and test cards that exercise specific autonomy behaviors and edge cases, with clear pass/fail criteria

- Execute on-water test events, participating in sorties aboard test and chase vessels while monitoring autonomy performance against expected behavior

- Analyze sortie data (logs, telemetry, sensor data) to characterize autonomy performance and isolate root causes of anomalies across perception, planning, control, and hardware

- Reproduce field anomalies in simulation and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HITL) environments, and build regression tests so fixes stay fixed

- Identify, document, and triage system discrepancies in Atlassian Jira with enough detail and reproducibility for autonomy and hardware engineers to act on

- Contribute to test plans, test procedures, and test readiness reviews under the direction of the Test & Evaluation Director