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About Avidbots:
Avidbots designs and manufactures autonomous mobile robots in order to bring robotic solutions into everyday life and increase organizational productivity. Its ground-breaking product is Neo, an autonomous floor-scrubbing robot that is widely deployed by the world’s leading facilities, including airports, shopping malls, warehouses, manufacturing sites, universities, and other commercial spaces worldwide.
Avidbots designs and manufactures autonomous mobile robots in order to bring robotic solutions into everyday life and increase organizational productivity. Its ground-breaking product is Neo, an autonomous floor-scrubbing robot that is widely deployed by the world’s leading facilities, including airports, shopping malls, warehouses, manufacturing sites, universities, and other commercial spaces worldwide.
Founded in 2014 by two robotics engineers from the University of Waterloo, the company today has a rapidly expanding customer base in over a dozen countries and offers comprehensive service and support to customers on five continents. Avidbots has grown to be a global leader in commercial service robots, achieving many important industry firsts along the way.
The company is backed by top global venture capital firms including True Ventures, Next47, GGV Capital, and Golden Ventures. Avidbots has its headquarters in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, and offices in the USA, Hong Kong, South Korea, Australia, and Colombia.
About this role:
As our team grows, we are in need of a software architect to lead technical planning and design for our growing autonomy team (perception, machine learning infrastructure, and planning stacks).
The ideal candidate has many years of experience in software development as well as having a strong academic background in mobile robotics: both perception and planning (Masters required – PhD prefered). You take a lot of pride in designing well structured, quality driven, and scalable infrastructures while collaborating with the technical team leads and other members. You have a wealth of practical and theoretical experience with many different sensor technologies (RGB cameras, LIDAR, ToF cameras, etc) as well the algorithms to use the sensors to localize and detect obstacles. You also have experience in planning software – all the way from mission planners down to controller level. Experience and background in deep learning approaches to obstacle detection (deep stereo, semantic segmentation) is ideal. You approach problems with scientific rigor and you lead the direction while keeping an open mind to new ideas and approaches. You are comfortable implementing, deploying, testing, and troubleshooting your code and systems, while maintaining a strong systems mindset. You have a wide breadth of knowledge in many areas of design and software development while also being able to get your hands dirty, help in development, and detailing the design documentation.
How you will make a difference:
Participate in the overall development of long term planning efforts, technical roadmaps while leading the technical planning for autonomy software (concentration in planning stack, perception stack and deep learning efforts)
Provide technical leadership on perception as well as staying up-to-date with industry-leading practices and technologies
Review and collaborate with team leads to ensure that their software architecture fits with the overall architecture and long term goals
Play an active role in the planning and perception related research activities conducted by our Advanced Technology Group (ATG)
Coach and mentor more junior level software/perception engineers on software development and autonomy algorithms/concepts by providing quality feedback/mentorship
Create, revise, and maintain design/technical documentation
Spend at least 30% of time developing our code base and helping the teams with the project particulars of implementation
Requirements:
Graduate level degree (MASc required – PhD preferred) in Perception (localization or obstacle detection topics), Computer Vision or equivalent
10+ years of software development experience
3+ years of practical experience deploying mobile robotics perception systems (sensors and algorithms)
3+ years of practical experience deploying mobile robotics planning algorithms (any part of the stack – either mission, planning or controls)
2+ years of experience reviewing/approving technical design decisions, creating design artifacts, and/or leading software development teams in a technical role
Strong software development background in C++ (C++11, 14) and Python
Strong working knowledge of Linux (application level, scripting, driver/kernel development, Yocto, etc)
Passionate about designing and developing high quality, scalable and robust software products
Strong verbal and written communication skills (able to summarize and explain complex issues and technical problems effectively)
Bonus:
Deep understanding of ROS, ROS 2 and future trends in the architecture of mobile robots
Experience in perception stacks and sensor sets of mobile robots
Experience in planning stacks (ROS 2 planning preferred)
Has a strong GitHub with contributions to open source robotics projects
A passion for robotics and hardware development
