Senior Motion Planning Engineer – Autonomous Driving, Land Domain (m/f/d)

About the role:

As Senior Motion Planning Engineer – Autonomous Driving, Land Domain, you will play a key role in shaping how our autonomous ground systems navigate safely, efficiently, and robustly through complex environments. You will develop motion planning capabilities that transform perception, localization, maps, mission objectives, and vehicle constraints into decisions and trajectories that our autonomous vehicles can execute in the real world.

You will take strong technical ownership of motion planning systems, architecture, and engineering decisions. You will contribute hands-on to complex technical challenges, challenge existing approaches, evaluate trade-offs, and continuously improve the reliability, scalability, and real-world performance of our planning capabilities.

As a senior engineer, you will act as a technical sparring partner for other engineers. You will share your expertise, review technical approaches, mentor less experienced colleagues, and contribute to engineering standards and best practices, while enabling teams to retain ownership of their respective systems and decisions.

Working closely with teams across perception, localization and mapping, control, simulation, platform software, verification, and vehicle integration, you will translate complex autonomy challenges into robust technical solutions. You will help align interfaces, requirements, and technical priorities across teams and support the transition of motion planning capabilities from development and simulation onto physical vehicles operating in the field.

What is your Day to Day Mission:

• Take technical ownership of motion planning capabilities, contributing to the architecture, technical roadmap, and quality of the systems that enable autonomous ground vehicles to navigate complex environments.

• Design and develop robust motion planning solutions, translating perception inputs, localization data, maps, mission objectives, and vehicle constraints into safe and executable decisions and trajectories.

• Contribute hands-on to complex engineering challenges, investigating planning failures, improving algorithms, debugging system-level issues, and optimizing performance for real-world vehicle operation.

• Drive strong engineering decisions, leading technical discussions, challenging assumptions, evaluating trade-offs, and helping teams make pragmatic and sustainable architectural choices.

• Translate operational and product needs into technical solutions, working with relevant stakeholders to define clear requirements, priorities, interfaces, and implementation plans.

• Drive collaboration across the autonomy stack, working closely with perception, localization and mapping, control, simulation, platform software, verification, and vehicle integration teams to establish robust interfaces and shared technical priorities.

• Keep motion planning closely connected to the real system, using simulation results, automated testing, field testing, vehicle data, operational feedback, and real-world failures to improve performance and reliability.

• Improve verification and validation coverage, contributing to scenario-based testing, simulation workflows, performance metrics, and automated evaluation methods for motion planning capabilities.

• Raise the technical standard across the team, sharing knowledge, reviewing software and system designs, mentoring other engineers, and contributing to engineering standards and development practices.

• Identify technical risks and dependencies early, helping teams address integration, performance, safety, scalability, and maintainability challenges before they become blockers.

• Act as a senior technical interface for motion planning, communicating architectural decisions, technical challenges, dependencies, and improvement opportunities clearly across engineering teams and stakeholders.

What you bring to the team:

• 8+ years of professional experience in autonomous driving, robotics, motion planning, controls, software engineering, or closely related engineering domains.

• Strong technical expertise in autonomous systems and motion planning, with experience designing, developing, and evolving planning capabilities for complex robotic or autonomous systems.

• A strong software engineering background, ideally including modern C++ and Python, with hands-on experience developing complex production systems for robotics, autonomous vehicles, or other cyber-physical systems.

• Solid understanding of motion planning methods, such as trajectory generation, path planning, search-based planning, optimization-based planning, sampling-based methods, behavioral planning, or comparable approaches.

• Experience working with vehicle and system constraints, including vehicle dynamics, kinematics, safety margins, collision avoidance, environmental uncertainty, and real-time performance requirements.

• Experience taking technical ownership of complex systems, contributing to architecture and technical roadmaps while driving decisions around reliability, scalability, maintainability, and system quality.

• Proven ability to solve complex engineering problems hands-on, including debugging system-level behavior, analyzing field failures, evaluating technical trade-offs, and developing pragmatic solutions.

• Experience with simulation and scenario-based testing, using virtual environments, automated evaluation, recorded vehicle data, or comparable methods to develop and validate motion planning capabilities.

• Experience delivering complex systems across team boundaries, managing technical dependencies and balancing engineering quality, operational constraints, verification requirements, and delivery commitments.

• Experience working across the autonomy stack, particularly with perception, localization and mapping, control, simulation, platform software, verification, and vehicle integration.

• Ability to provide technical guidance and mentorship, supporting other engineers through design discussions, code and architecture reviews, knowledge sharing, and engineering best practices without requiring formal people-management responsibility.

• Excellent judgment, communication, and collaboration skills, with the ability to explain complex technical topics, influence engineering decisions, align stakeholders, and drive technical topics across organizational boundaries.

Note: We operate in an industry where women, as well as other minority groups, are systematically under-represented. We encourage you to apply even if you dont meet all the listed qualifications; ability and impact cannot be summarised in a few bullet points.

Why Quantum-Systems:

• We believe in the power of combined efforts: straightforward tech expertise paired with a customer-centric focus.

• We are industry pioneers who are ambitious, bold, and visionary.

• We push limits, think outside-the-box and strive for technological excellence to shape the future of aerial data.

• We promise to be your runway for individual and professional growth.

Our benefits:

• Company pension scheme: We support you so that you can already make provisions for later.

• Flexible working hours: With trust-based working hours, you are not only responsible for your working hours, but also for your work-life balance.

• Mobile Work: If things get a little busy in the office, you have the option to work remotely one flexible day per week to create the right balance.

• Stay active: With EGYM Wellpass, you get access to thousands of fitness and sports facilities — and of course, we subsidize the membership.

• Bike-Leasing: We support you in staying environmentally mobile and healthy.

• Corporate Benefits: Your opportunity for attractive offers and discounts from well-known suppliers and brands, e.g. Adidas, Apple, Expedia.

• Employee events: We not only want to grow together, but also celebrate our successes together.

• Lunch-Card: Be powerful with delicious energy, daily lunch budget is sponsored.

• Company Shuttle: Enjoy our convenient shuttle service that picks you up from Laim in Munich and brings you to our location, with return trips at the end of the workday.

About us:

Quantum Systems is a leading European deep-tech company for unmanned systems across air, land and maritime domains. We develop and scale integrated hardware, software and AI-powered solutions for mission-critical operations. By combining autonomous platforms with intelligent software and AI, Quantum Systems enables customers to operate, understand and act across domains.

Our commitment:

We are an open-minded company that not only values diversity, but actively promotes it. Regardless of gender, age, ethnic origin, religion, sexual orientation or disability, we firmly believe that the diversity of our employees is an essential part of our success.

At our company, every voice is heard and every perspective is valued. We believe that our differences enrich us and help us to find creative solutions and generate innovative ideas. We pride ourselves on creating an inclusive work environment where all employees can reach their full potential.

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