Senior Hardware Engineer, Lidar

Latitude AI (lat.ai) is building the future of Ford’s autonomy roadmap to make travel safer, less stressful, and more enjoyable for everyone. Bringing this vision to scale, our fully in-house developed hands-free ADAS platform will debut on Ford’s all-new Universal Electric Vehicle in 2027.  When you join the Latitude team, you’ll work alongside leading experts across machine learning and robotics, cloud platforms, mapping, sensors and compute systems, test operations, systems and safety engineering – all dedicated to redefining the relationship between people and their vehicles for millions of customers. As a Ford Motor Company subsidiary, we operate independently to develop automated driving technology at the speed of a technology startup. Latitude is headquartered in Pittsburgh with engineering centers in Dearborn, Mich., and Palo Alto, Calif. Meet the team: The hardware sensing team is responsible for the benchmarking, characterizing, and nomination and integration of all sensors. We work cross functionally with systems, perceptions, vehicle integration to ensure the sensors meet Latitude’s ODD requirements, perception requirements, and that it is integrable and reliable in Ford’s series vehicles. We are expected to understand sensing from a first principle approach and to ensure those principles are designable and manufacturable.  We keep a breadth of all sensing technology, sensing vendors, and integration technologies. Members of the team are expected to be highly multidisciplinary, as successful sensor integration requires expert understanding and comfortability of concepts across many disciplines–from hardware and software. What you’ll do:  Lead technical development of radar or lidar sensing systems from early concept, benchmarking, and sourcing through production launch Define sensor performance targets, requirements, evaluation criteria, and validation plans based on vehicle, perception, and ODD needs Drive sensor benchmarking and technical down-selection across candidate suppliers and technologies Lead supplier technical engagement, including requirements reviews, data reviews, architecture discussions, issue resolution, and design maturity assessments Guide architecture and tradeoff decisions related to sensing performance, environmental robustness, packaging, thermal constraints, power, diagnostics, manufacturability, and cost Work cross-functionally with systems, perception, firmware, validation, vehicle integration, manufacturing, and quality teams to ensure the sensor meets downstream functional and program needs Review test data from supplier, bench, track, and vehicle testing; identify performance gaps; determine root cause; and drive corrective actions Assess whether supplier evidence is technically credible by reviewing test conditions, assumptions, filtering, sample quality, boundary cases, repeatability, and alignment to sensor physics and system requirements Lead technical reviews and challenge unsupport...