--- title: 'Data Engineer (SE / Sr SE) at PlusAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/data-engineer-se-sr-se-plusai-santa-clara-90rq3eg8kg6j' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-15' --- # Data Engineer (SE / Sr SE) at PlusAI - **Company:** PlusAI - **Location:** Santa Clara, CA - **Compensation:** $130k–$200k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-08-10 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-15 - **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/plus-2/cd1e5dca-104e-4429-af74-ee6da17596cb ## Job description PlusAI is a Physical AI company pioneering AI-based virtual driver software for factory-built autonomous trucks. Headquartered in Silicon Valley with operations in the United States and Europe, Plus was named by Fast Company as one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies. Partners including TRATON GROUP’s Scania, MAN, and International brands, Hyundai Motor Company, Iveco Group, Bosch, and DSV are working with Plus to accelerate the deployment of next-generation autonomous trucks. If you’re ready to make a huge impact and drive the future of autonomy, Plus is looking for talented individuals to join its fast-growing teams. 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: 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 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 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 Build the data foundations and tooling for release management, including release-over-release comparisons, readiness and gating criteria, and traceable evidence supporting release decisions 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 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: - BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience - Proficiency in Python, with experience building scalable data processing systems or evaluation frameworks - Experience developing metrics and analyzing large-scale time-series, event, or geospatial data, including principled metric definitions, validation, and error analysis - Experience building LLM-powered or agentic workflows for data analysis, evaluation, or automation - Ability to solve open-ended technical challenges and communicate findings clearly to engineering and program stakeholders - 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: - Experience with distributed data processing such as Apache Spark, and workflow orchestration such as Airflow or Argo Workflows - Familiarity with LLM agent frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph, or similar) and prompt/tool-orchestration patterns - Experience with geospatial data and tooling, such as GIS formats, map matching, spatial indexing and joins, PostGIS, GeoPandas, or map-based visualization libraries - Experience with release engineering, quality gating, or automated regression detection - Experience with autonomous vehicles, robotics, or other safety-critical systems - Experience building dashboards or analytics interfaces that expose metrics to users ## Your opportunities joining PlusAI Work, learn and grow in a highly future-oriented, innovative and dynamic field. Wide range of opportunities for personal and professional development. Catered free lunch, unlimited snacks and beverages. Highly competitive salary and benefits package, including 401(k) plan. ## About PlusAI ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: PlusAI develops AI-based autonomous driving software for heavy trucks, powering Level 4 (L4) virtual driver systems that enable trucks to operate without human intervention on highways. - **Entity Type**: Private (planning to go public via a SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp IX, NYSE: PLAV – conflicting reports indicate the reverse merger may have been cancelled) - **Headquarters**: Santa Clara, California, United States - **Founded**: 2016 - **Founders**: Not publicly available in provided sources ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Autonomous driving / automotive technology - **Target customers**: B2B – global truck manufacturers (OEMs) and large freight fleets - **Mission**: To make trucking safer, more efficient, and more sustainable by deploying AI-powered autonomous driving at scale ## Products & Services - **SuperDrive**: L4 autonomous driving system that serves as a virtual driver for factory-built heavy trucks. Designed to be installed by OEMs and monetized on a per-mile usage basis. - **PlusDrive**: A driver-assist version of SuperDrive that keeps a human in the cabin to oversee the system. Already in commercial use, reducing driver fatigue and fuel costs. - **SuperDrive HyperFoundry**: A suite of proprietary AV data and tools (data acquisition, auto-labeling, 3D reconstruction, neural simulation) sold to third-party customers today, generating revenue before the full L4 launch. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed; the SPAC merger was valued at $300M (conflicting reports of cancellation). - **Key Metric**: Annual revenue of $4M (as of latest data); total funding of ~$1.3B across 8 rounds. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: TRATON GROUP (Scania, MAN, International), Hyundai Motor Company, Iveco Group, Bosch, DSV, Ryder. - **Growth Signals**: - Active trial with Ryder and International on a 600+ mile daily route (I-35 corridor) – 60,000+ cumulative miles, approaching 100 runs. - Recent software upgrades enabling night driving and construction zone capabilities. - Partnered with multiple global OEMs to install SuperDrive on factory-built trucks – no retrofitting required. - 7M+ miles of L4-validated data collected. ## Competitive Advantages - **Asset-light software model**: Zero manufacturing capex – PlusAI is a pure-play software provider, avoiding heavy hardware costs. - **OEM integration**: Factory-installed by partners like TRATON and Hyundai, providing a scalable path to thousands of trucks. - **Proprietary data moat**: Over $500M in R&D investment and 7M+ miles of validated data enable advanced AI models (end-to-end and vision-language-action). - **Capital efficiency**: Path to cash-flow positive in 2027E, with lower OpEx than key competitors. ## Strategic Focus - **Near-term**: Commercial launch of driverless L4 trucks in 2027, targeting revenue from per-mile usage. - **Current revenue generation**: Selling AV data and tools (HyperFoundry) to third parties. - **R&D edge**: Leveraging large AI models and generative AI to continuously improve the virtual driver’s capabilities and expand the Operational Design Domain (ODD). ## Why Work Here - **Culture & ratings**: Employer rating of 4.1/5 (30 reviews), with high marks for work-life balance (4.6), culture (4.7), and career growth (4.6). - **Engineering focus**: 105 technical employees (23% of workforce); active job postings (38) include senior ML infrastructure, perception, planning, simulation, and engineering intern roles. - **Global offices**: HQ in Santa Clara, CA, with offices in Fremont, Cupertino, and Munich, Germany. Workforce spans 8 countries. - **Notable perks**: Opportunity to work on cutting-edge autonomous driving technology with partners like TRATON, Hyundai, and Bosch. Strong talent pipeline from Stanford, CMU, and alumni at Waymo, NVIDIA, Apple. ## Sources 1. [LinkedIn – PlusAI](https://linkedin.com/company/plusai) 2. [CB Insights – PlusAI](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/plusai) 3. [PitchBook – PlusAI](https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/180375-76) 4. [PlusAI Presentation (April 2026)](https://www.plus.ai/documents/plusai-presentation-april-2026.pdf) 5. [PlusAI Careers Page (Lever)](https://jobs.lever.co/plus-2) ## Other roles at PlusAI - [Program Manager - Japan (Bilingual Japanese/English)](https://feeny.ai/job/program-manager-japan-bilingual-japanese-english-plusai-santa-clara-0ahxgnsxxmm4) — Santa Clara, CA - [Software Verification & Validation Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/software-verification-validation-engineer-plusai-santa-clara-fv6fv3b784ja) — Santa Clara, CA - [Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Motion Planning](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-software-engineer-motion-planning-plusai-santa-clara-x1pkbe5ekz4a) — Santa Clara, CA - [Senior/Staff Software Engineer (Machine Learning Runtime), Motion Planning](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-software-engineer-machine-learning-runtime-motion-planning-plusai-3ayj39bayq6s) — Santa Clara, CA - [Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Reinforcement Learning), Motion Planning](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-machine-learning-engineer-reinforcement-learning-motion-planning-ww5yty7kqtr9) — Santa Clara, CA - [Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Motion Planning](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-staff-machine-learning-engineer-motion-planning-plusai-santa-clara-4sa79vvqk8c2) — Santa Clara, CA - [Software Engineer (SE / Sr SE), Fullstack](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-se-sr-se-fullstack-plusai-santa-clara-ctmf6p8xwe3x) — Santa Clara, CA - [Senior Simulation Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-simulation-software-engineer-plusai-santa-clara-j0eghaqdq4hv) — Santa Clara, CA - [Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Perception](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-machine-learning-engineer-perception-plusai-santa-clara-av26fffj0ehh) — Santa Clara, CA - [Principal Engineer, Mapping and Localization](https://feeny.ai/job/principal-engineer-mapping-and-localization-plusai-santa-clara-pqv0j6919kv9) — Santa Clara, CA