Applied Intuition
Technical Lead Manager - Perception, Self-Driving Systems
Sunnyvale, California, United States · Senior · Contract
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odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
$20,466 more — $252,366 — moves this role to Level III and 3 lottery entries. That figure is inside the range the employer already advertised.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $252,366 would place this position at wage Level III. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Architectural and Engineering Managers" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Architectural and Engineering Managers (11-9041) · San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
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Files H-1B transfers
Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.
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About the role
- This is a single combined model: shared backbone, multi-task heads, serving every SDS program from the same codebase.
- The same model runs on a passenger car in Los Angeles, a truck in rural Japan, and an offroad vehicle in the Philippines.
- Different sensor configurations, different road geometries, different weather distributions, one model.
Responsibilities
- You will lead the team that trains, evaluates, and ships this model, and you will be hands-on in the architecture and training decisions that drive its performance.
- Lead training and iteration cycles hands-on. You will be in the data, the eval dashboards, and the failure analysis. When perception regresses in a new geography or road type, you own understanding why and fixing it.
- Manage the model lifecycle from training through quantization and deployment on embedded compute, including device-specific optimizations. Close the gap between what the model does offboard and what it does on the vehicle.
- Recruit, develop, and technically lead a team of perception engineers. Set high technical standards and create a culture of rigorous experimentation and measurement.
- Own model performance across the full deployment surface: highway, urban, residential, ramps, complex intersections, poor weather, hilly terrain. You care about on-vehicle driving outcomes, not just offline metrics.
Requirements
- 2+ years managing or technically leading a perception team, with ability to both set direction and contribute to architecture and training decisions directly.
Nice to have
- Familiarity with occupancy-based scene representations, sparse query-based architectures, or temporal aggregation approaches.
- Experience reducing or removing map dependencies in perception systems.
- Experience with closed-loop simulation for perception model evaluation (neural sim, log sim, scenario-based testing).
- Experience at an AV company that has shipped perception to production.
- Please reference the job posting's subtitle for where this position will be located.
- Don't meet every single requirement?
- If you're excited about this role but your past experience doesn't align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway.
- You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.
Skills
- About Applied Intuition
- Applied Intuition, Inc. is powering the future of physical AI.
- Applied Intuition is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Washington, D.C.; San Diego; Ft.
- Walton Beach, Florida; Ann Arbor, Michigan; London; Stuttgart; Munich; Stockholm; Bangalore; Seoul; and Tokyo.
- Learn more at applied.co.
Compensation
- at Applied Intuition for eligible roles includes base salary, equity, and benefits.
- Applied Intuition pay ranges reflect the minimum and maximum intended target base salary for new hire salaries for the position.
- For pay transparency purposes, the base salary range for this full-time position in the location listed is: $231,900 - $298,100 USD annually.
Benefits
- Note that benefits are subject to change and may vary based on jurisdiction of employment.
Company info
- Founded in 2017 and now valued at $15 billion, the Silicon Valley company is creating the digital infrastructure needed to bring intelligence to every moving machine on the planet.
- We are an in-office company, and our expectation is that employees primarily work from their Applied Intuition office 5 days a week.
- We're looking for someone who has: - 5+ years in ML/deep learning for perception or 3D scene understanding.
- We are looking for a Technical Lead Manager to own the perception model at the core of our autonomy stack.
- Drive a camera-first perception strategy. The goal is to progressively reduce dependencies on HD maps and lidar. How to get there is part of the job.
This listing is sourced directly from Applied Intuition's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.