JOB PURPOSE: Lead a team to develop, integrate or test complex autonomy systems that meet prioritized requirements and stay within budget and time frame constraints for autonomous machine programs that focus on machine safety and productivity and provide a differentiated product value to our customers.

JOB RELATED STATISTICS: Budget is project dependent. This is not a supervisory position.

JOB DUTIES: For Caterpillar, digital means using technology to extract data from our machines and engines and transform it into valuable recommendations or “insights,” to help customers make better, more informed decisions and help Caterpillar make robust products with the lowest total ownership cost. Our products generate and process large amounts of data from sensors, on-board models, and control algorithms in real-time creating real-world machine usage information. As part of the overall digital strategy Caterpillar has developed an integrated family of Autonomous and semi-autonomous machines. This family of products is branded Command. The Command product range links with other mining and business information systems and is an integral part of the Mining Technology Enabled Solutions vision.

The Automation Project Team Leader role within the autonomy area is a combination of technical team leadership and individual contributor activities that utilize their own technical expertise.

This position helps the team focus on the development, integration and/or troubleshooting of autonomy systems used for autonomous machines by defining, prioritizing, and communicating requirements and assigning work efforts. Prioritization efforts will require a good knowledge of the trade-offs between time, resources and quality. The incumbent may be asked to help in the team selection process. This position helps manage the overall project or job and may be involved in financial planning as well. This position helps set the team’s vision and purpose and may be asked to provide input to the manager for performance reviews. The incumbent will be the first point of connection for team members and must stay aware of team member efforts. The Automation Project Team Leader represents the team as the spokesperson in technical meetings as well as potential management and customer updates. The incumbent will need to work well with other teams and help remove roadblocks for issues that cross multiple organizations. The Automation Project Team Leader is expected to mentor and coach others and provide technical leadership and potentially training to new staff members.

This position will also use technical skills in the autonomy area that may include complex autonomy onboard system design work, subsystem testing or system integration. It may require specific knowledge of machine systems or automation technologies such as Path Planning, Perception and Positioning. The position uses technical automation knowledge that often must be combined with application/software development skills to develop high quality automation software. It may also require a strong quality focus through design reviews and significant interaction with downstream integration points. Significant data analysis and systems analysis skills are needed to help troubleshoot complex issues from test or customer sites, and to examine information from test sites to improve overall systems performance.

Keeping up with industry trends and new technology breakthroughs is essential and requires continuous learning through self/internet study as well as interaction with other autonomous engineers through conferences and papers.

BACKGROUND/EXPERIENCE: Requires either a:

•Bachelor degree in an accredited Engineering or Computer Science curriculum, at least six years of experience with design development of complex autonomous vehicles and at least two years of deep C++ programming experience

•Or an advanced degree (i.e. Masters, PhD) in an Engineering or Computer Science related field and at least four years of experience.

Advanced degrees are highly desired. Incumbents must have demonstrated excellent analytical skills and the ability to perform complex assignments. Requires strong technical leadership skills. Must have strong problem solving skills and analytical skills and the ability to communicate technical information effectively.