Team Lead Robotics Software & Systems Architecture

Team Lead Robotics Software & Systems Architecture

Tesla

Grünheide (Mark), Germany

Role mission

You will own the architecture of the autonomy stack and act as the technical lead of the robotics team. This is a hands-on individual-contributor role rather than a people-management one: you set the technical direction, make the hard design calls, and carry the other engineers with you, while the Program Lead looks after the organisational side.

What You’ll Do

• Define the system architecture and the interface contracts between the autonomy compute, the vehicle control unit, the safety controller, and the WMS/FMS.
• Own localization and mapping, fusing vision-based SLAM with fiducial (QR) landmarks and CAD priors so that pose estimation stays accurate and drift-bounded down long, repetitive aisles and across shift-to-shift change.
• Own motion planning and the behaviour and task layer that sequences aisle navigation, docking, and pallet handling.
• Design the authority handoff between autonomous control and teleoperation, and the safe states around it, together with the Safety Engineer.
• Establish pragmatic CI, simulation, and OTA/release practices that a lean team can sustain.
• Set technical direction, run design and code review, mentor the engineers, and keep the team unblocked on the decisions that matter.
• Own the software side of interface control with the vehicle's manufacturer, including bus protocols, timing, and fault and safe-state semantics.

What You’ll Bring

• Around eight years or more building autonomy or robotics software, including at least one multi-subsystem robot whose architecture you owned and took to a pilot or into production.
• Real experience leading engineers technically and being accountable for how a program turns out.
• Deep C and C++ and fluent Python, at home on Linux and comfortable with the constraints of real-time Linux.
• Fluency with ROS 2 or a comparable robotics framework.
• A track record of taking vision-based localization and SLAM from the lab into reliable field operation, including integrating third-party perception or SLAM components where it makes sense.
• Fluency with real-time vehicle interfaces such as CAN and CAN-FD and industrial Ethernet, and a sound instinct for the boundary between safety-rated and non-safety software.
• Strong written and spoken English, the language the team works in.

Nice to have

• Teleoperation or other low-latency remote-operation systems.
• Having taken robots into regulated or industrial settings that required CE marking.
• A background in warehouse automation, AGVs, or AMRs.
• A comfortable, AI-native way of working, where you already use modern AI coding assistants day to day, lean on evaluations to keep them honest, and help the team raise its standards for these tools.