About this Senior Engineering Manager - Vehicle Application Software role at Sonatus
At Sonatus, we’re driving the transformation to AI-enabled software-defined vehicles. Traditional automotive software methods can’t keep pace with consumer expectations shaped by the mobile industry—where features evolve rapidly, update seamlessly, and improve continuously. That’s why leading OEMs trust Sonatus to accelerate this shift. Our technology is already in production across more than 8 million vehicles on the road today and rapidly expanding.
Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, with 250+ employees worldwide, Sonatus combines the agility of a fast-growing company with the scale and impact of an established partner. Backed by strong funding and proven by global deployment, we’re solving some of the most interesting and complex challenges in the industry. Join us and help redefine what’s possible as we shape the future of mobility.
You will lead an engineering team responsible for in-vehicle middleware and platform services for the Sonatus Fastlane Collector and Copilot products, with a focus on people management, process, architecture, and code reviews.
This is an opportunity for an engineering leader who enjoys growing people, improving engineering systems and guiding technical direction in a complex embedded software environment.
We would encourage candidates with experience in other highly reliable embedded environments such as industrial automation, robotics, medical devices, telecommunications, aerospace or IoT to apply.
Key Responsibilities:
- Manage, mentor, and grow an embedded software development team.
- Foster an inclusive, collaborative culture focused on technical excellence, continuous learning and ownership.
- Drive the planning and delivery of software for Fastlane products on embedded Linux and High-Performance Compute (HPC) platforms.
- Provide architectural oversight through system design and code reviews, ensuring the software meets high-availability, low-latency, and fault-tolerance requirements for vehicle telemetry.
- Align agile development practices with automotive reliability standards (e.g., MISRA).
- Define hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing strategies and resolve integration bottlenecks in partnership with Hardware Engineering and QA.
- Improve developer workflows in collaboration with the internal tools team.
- Integrate LLM/agentic tooling into the engineering environment to increase development velocity while maintaining code quality.
Requirements:
- Degree (BS, MS, or PhD) in Computer Science, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or a related technical field.
- 8+ years in embedded software development, including technical leadership and architectural design.
- 3+ years of engineering management experience with direct reports.
- Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to communicate complex development trade-offs clearly to Product, Hardware, and QA teams.
- Experience delivering commercial software products for mission-critical, internet-connected devices.
- Deep experience building embedded systems, modern C++, inter-process communication.
- Experience with embedded operating systems (Linux, Android, QNX) and HIL testing.
- Experience implementing communication protocols (CAN, Ethernet, HTTP, MQTT).
- Familiarity with automotive standards (e.g., AUTOSAR Adaptive, UDS) is a plus.
