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Toyota Research Institute · 2 days ago

Senior Data Engineer

Los Altos, CA

Full-time

Hybrid

Senior Level, Lead/Staff

$180K/yr - $270K/yr

8+ years exp

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) is on a mission to improve the quality of human life through innovative tools and capabilities. They are seeking a Senior Data Engineer to design and build foundational data infrastructure and tools for autonomy research and development workflows, including large-scale ingestion pipelines and performance diagnostics for machine learning workflows.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)AutomotiveConsumer ResearchMachine LearningProduct Research

Comp. & Benefits

H1B Sponsor Likely

Responsibilities

Design and implement scalable, production-grade pipelines for data ingestion, transformation, storage, and retrieval from vehicle fleets and simulation environments

Build internal tools and services for data labeling, curation, indexing, and cataloging across large and diverse datasets

Collaborate with ML researchers, autonomy engineers, and data scientists to design schemas and APIs that power model training, evaluation, and debugging

Develop and maintain feature stores, metadata systems, and versioning infrastructure for structured and unstructured data

Support the generation and integration of synthetic datasets with real-world logs to enable hybrid training and simulation workflows

Optimize pipelines for cost, latency, and traceability, ensuring reproducibility and consistency across environments

Partner with simulation and cloud platform teams to automate workflows for closed-loop testing, scenario mining, and performance analytics

Qualification

Data EngineeringETL PipelinesCloud-native ArchitecturesPythonSQLC++Apache SparkData QualitySoftware Engineering FundamentalsCI/CDTestingCode ReviewService DeploymentCollaboration

Required

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related field

8+ years of experience building data-intensive software systems, ideally in robotics, autonomous driving, or large-scale ML environments

Proficient in Python, SQL, and familiar with C++

Experience designing ETL pipelines using modern frameworks (e.g., Apache Spark, Flyte, Union)

Strong knowledge of cloud-native architectures, including AWS services (e.g., S3, or equivalents (Google Cloud platform)

Familiarity with sensor data types (camera, lidar, radar, GPS/IMU) and common data serialization formats (e.g., protobuf. ROS2bag, MCAP)

Deep understanding of data quality, observability, and lineage in high-volume systems

Track record of building reliable and performant infrastructure that supports both ad-hoc exploration and repeatable production workflows

Preferred

Experience in AD/ADAS, robotics, or autonomous systems — especially handling perception or planning datasets

Familiarity with ML pipeline orchestration frameworks (e.g. Kubeflow, SageMaker, etc)

Experience working with temporal or spatial data, including geospatial indexing and time-series alignment

Exposure to synthetic data generation, simulation logging, or scenario replay pipelines

Strong software engineering fundamentals, CI/CD, testing, code review, and service deployment best practices

Experience collaborating with cross-functional, distributed teams across research and production orgs

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

Paid time off benefits (including holiday pay and sick time)

Company

Toyota Research Institute

Glassdoor4.2

Toyota Research Institute is an R&D enterprise with an initial focus on artificial intelligence and robotics.

Founded in 2016

Palo Alto, California, USA

201-500 employees

http://www.tri.global

H1B Sponsorship

Toyota Research Institute has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)

Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship

Represents job field similar to this job

Trends of Total Sponsorships

2025 (10)

2020 (7)