AV Ml/Ops

Company: Ford Motor Company US
Location: Ann Arbor
Posted on: June 8, 2021

Job Description:

Job Description & Qualifications

At Ford Motor Company, we believe freedom of movement drives human progress. We also believe in providing you with the freedom to define and realize your dreams. With our incredible plans for the future of mobility, we have a wide variety of opportunities for you to accelerate your career potential as you help us define tomorrow's transportation.

This future is being created today by Ford's AV LLC team. This fun, fast-moving, innovative group of highly skilled and motivated people is looking for candidates to support research and developmental efforts in producing fully autonomous vehicles (SAE Level 4).

What you'll be able to do:

The "Autonomous Vehicle Machine Learning Operations (ML-Ops)" position entails helping drive the AI/ML life cycle that will power the next generation of perception algorithms on Ford's Autonomous Vehicles. The AV needs to understand its 3D environment and plan a safe path through it, whilst following the rules of the road. Perception tasks like drive-able surface estimation, lane detection and 3D object detection and tracking will be performed using LIDAR, camera and radar sensors. This will require a continuous cycle of data collection, labelling, neural network training, re-simulation, testing and then re-training/fine-tuning. Neural nets will be continuously modified and validated as and when new data comes in and new edge cases identified. Designing and engineering this ML-ops cycle will be key to increasing the pace of neural network model deployment.

You will:

• You will oversee LIDAR, camera and radar data collection on our fleet of AVs to develop perception algorithms and develop the requirements, plan, and strategies to collect a diverse, high quality dataset
• You will develop and improve the existing tools for preprocessing the collected data for annotation. You will also be using these tools to provide data to the annotation stage
• You will organize the Quality Assurance for verification of the labelled data
• You will work with the perception team to tune algorithms on the annotated dataset and conduct performance evaluations on the trained models
• You will develop tools and infrastructure to find and tag difficult cases for the perception algorithms to get those annotated and feed through the training process
• You will develop a searchable database based on parameters such as scenario, location, time of day, maneuver type, etc.

The minimum requirements we seek:

• Bachelor's degree in Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or Computer Science.
• 1+ years of experience developing a commercial CV/ML application (coursework/internship/co-op experience allowed).

Our preferred requirements:

• Experience with training neural nets on a cloud-based ML service like AWS/Azure
• Experience working in a team-based project from inception to demonstration across multiple disciplines, e.g., hardware design and implementation, data acquisition and analysis, mathematical modeling, algorithm development, application implementation, etc.
• Experience with multiple sensor systems that utilize a combination of LIDAR and cameras.
• Experience with neural network development in at least one of the following areas: monocular depth estimation, semantic segmentation and 3D object detection/classification using an ML framework like Tensor Flow / Keras / Pytorch.
• Possess strong oral and written language skills.

What you'll receive in return:

As part of the Ford family, you'll enjoy excellent compensation and a comprehensive benefits package that includes generous PTO, retirement, savings and stock investment plans, incentive compensation and much more. You'll also experience exciting opportunities for professional and personal growth and recognition.

If you have what it takes to help us redefine the future of mobility, we'd love to have you join us.

Visa sponsorship available for this position.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to a culturally diverse workforce. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, age, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status or protected veteran status.

https://corporate.ford.com/content/dam/corporate/us/en-us/documents/careers/2021-benefits-and-comp-GSR-sal-plan-2.pdf

Keywords: Ford Motor Company US, Ann Arbor , AV Ml/Ops, Other , Ann Arbor, Michigan