AEAutonomy Engineer
AE
Career

Autonomy Engineer

By the numbers
Typical pay
$122,930 / yr
Education to start
Bachelor's degree
Future demand
+2.1% by 2034
People in this job
154K
Figures shown for ·closest of 2 O*NET occupations
The work
A day, hour by hour
09:00
Standup & triage

Sync with robotics team; flag which sim failures blocked overnight test runs.

09:20
Sim deep dive

Replay thousands of virtual miles to hunt the edge case that caused a phantom brake.

11:00
Sensor fusion work

Fuse lidar and camera feeds; decide which sensor to trust when they disagree.

13:00
Model training review

Check if the object-detection model is truly learning or just memorizing test data.

14:30
Field test run

Take the autonomous vehicle outside; watch it handle a messy real-world intersection.

16:30
Log forensics

Dig through sensor logs to find exactly why the system yielded at the wrong moment.

17:30
Algorithm optimization

Squeeze the path-planning code to hit real-time speed on the onboard chip.

18:30
Safety call

Decide with the team: enough sim coverage to greenlight next week's public road test?

Things you do
  • Build software that lets machines see, decide, and move on their own.
  • Write algorithms that plan safe paths around obstacles in real time.
  • Fuse data from cameras, lidar, and radar into one clear picture of the world.
  • Train and test machine learning models to detect objects and predict movement.
  • Run thousands of simulated miles to catch bugs before real-world testing.
Decisions you’ll make
  • Is my system safe enough to test in the real world, or do I need more simulation first?
  • Should the vehicle yield here, or is that the wrong call given the full scene?
  • Is this rare edge case worth engineering around, or is the risk acceptable?
  • Is my model actually understanding the environment, or just getting lucky on test data?
  • Should I trust the camera here, or defer to what the lidar is telling me?
Education Pathways · how you get there
100 in 100 went the college route · 0 in 100 found another way in None, typically
Education mapped from O*NET: