About the role
- Vehicle Infrastructure (VI) is the critical layer bridging our autonomy stack and the physical machines it powers.
- As a Senior Vehicle Infrastructure Engineer, you are the architect of reliability and scale, owning the OS, provisioning, and release paths that ensure our autonomous fleet operates predictably in the field. This role goes far beyond maintenance; you will design the platform that prevents failures by design, collaborating with our DevOps team to orchestrate CI/CD pipelines, while taking full ownership of their operational impact and quality, evolving our OTA update strategies, and building the automation that makes our vehicle state reproducible, resilient, and ready for global deployment.
- This position requires a multi-talented engineer who thrives where software intersects with the physical world. You won’t just maintain the status quo; you will architect our autonomous platform’s reliability. This requires a systems-first mindset that navigates seamlessly across engineering boundaries—debugging bare-metal firmware and raw sensor streams in the vehicle bay, optimizing the underlying OS and container runtime, and architecting the infrastructure that bridges our fleet to the cloud. We are looking for an engineer who treats every vehicle-level issue as a design challenge, transforming manual interventions into automated solutions that scale from the hardware level up to our global delivery pipelines.
What you'll do
Platform Architecture & Systems Engineering
- Architect and harden the core vehicle operating environment, including kernel selection, secure boot protocols, and system-level health monitoring
- Design end-to-end provisioning frameworks that allow for zero-touch deployment of both vehicle fleets and developer environments
- Develop containerized runtime strategies that optimize resource isolation across heterogeneous hardware
- Implement sophisticated software distribution and versioning strategies to ensure safe upgrade and rollback paths for mission-critical systems
CI/CD and Engineering Productivity
- Collaborate with DevOps to implement and scale global CI/CD infrastructure, taking full ownership of pipeline throughput, build quality, and automated unit/integration testing
- Partner with DevOps to drive the software release process, taking ownership of release-candidate integrity, version pinning, and go/no-go readiness
- Collaborate with DevOps to architect OTA update pipelines, taking full ownership of deployment success, verification logic, and rollback strategies across remote, industrial fleets
Hardware-Software Integration & Diagnostics
- Act as the final authority on system-level failures, diagnosing complex issues across the OS, network, sensors, and firmware boundaries
- Bridge the gap between software and physical hardware by debugging on real hardware, using knowledge of sensors and firmware, to find the root cause of issues.
- Build custom diagnostic tooling and runbooks that empower the wider engineering team to self-solve infrastructure bottlenecks
Technical Leadership & Strategy
- Bring rigorous project management to infrastructure work, prioritizing long-term platform stability over short-term fixes
- Mentor the engineering organization on systems best practices, deployment safety, and modern infrastructure-as-code principles
- Champion a culture of automation and reliability, ensuring our autonomous platform scales ahead of our fleet growth
Qualifications
- Substantial hands-on experience running Linux in production — typically 5+ years, weighted on depth and judgment rather than the number
- Strong Linux system administration: systemd, networking, storage, users and permissions, package management, kernel and driver management, and real debugging ability when a machine misbehaves
- DevOps and CI/CD experience where you built and owned pipelines rather than only consuming them
- Strong scripting in Bash and Python
- Willing and eager to work hands-on with real hardware — physical vehicles, raw sensor data, bare-metal debugging, cabling and connectors, CAN traffic
- Excellent communication and a genuine willingness to help others; front-line support is a core part of the job
- Strong leadership and organizational skills; proactive rather than reactive
- Experience working with and writing modern, maintainable C++ code.
- Strong communicator, comfortable working closely with people both in-office and remote
- Based in or willing to relocate to the Mountain View, CA area; this role is on-site with regular hands-on vehicle work
Bonus Qualifications
- Strong proficiency in writing and maintaining large, modern C++ code.
- AWS (IoT/Greengrass, S3, EC2, IAM/SSO, Lambda) and infrastructure-as-code
- Shipping OTA updates to IoT devices or autonomous vehicles, including staged rollout, verification, and rollback
- Deep Ubuntu/Debian experience, including package building and distribution, and managing OS upgrades across a fleet you can't afford to brick
- ROS/ROS2 and C++ literacy to read the stack you support, reproduce a failure, and file or fix an actionable bug
- CAN bus, firmware updates, wiring, or general electrical troubleshooting
- Yocto or other embedded Linux build systems; ARM targets
- Containers beyond the basics: rootless Docker, Podman, image registries, GPU-enabled containers
- Configuration management (Ansible or similar) and secret management
- Supporting a fleet of autonomous vehicles, robots, or IoT devices at scale
- Familiarity with QA processes and test management tooling
- Supporting hardware in the field, at customer sites, or over low-connectivity links
- Experience leading a small team
Benefits & Perks
- Health benefits (Medical, Dental, Vision) through Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, and Guardian, with multiple plan tiers to choose from
- Ancillary benefits including accident, critical illness, and hospital indemnity plans (Voya)
- Company-paid basic life insurance, plus voluntary (supplemental) life for you and your dependents
- Short-term and long-term disability insurance plans
- HSA and FSA (Health & Dependent Daycare)
- Employee Assistance Program
- 1:1 Health Concierge
- Company 401(k)
- Commuter Benefits
- Flexible PTO policy
- Sabbatical leave opportunity after 5 years with the company
- Paid Parental Leave
- Daily lunches for in-office employees and fully-stocked kitchen with snacks and beverages
Equal Opportunity Employer
Cyngn is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, genetic information, marital status, familial status, military or veteran status, citizenship status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law. This policy applies to all aspects of employment, including recruitment, hiring, compensation, benefits, training, promotion, discipline, and termination.
If you require accommodation during the application or interview process due to a disability, please let us know and we will work with you to provide reasonable accommodation