Richard Gruner
Staff Technical Program Manager
Experience
Feb 2022 - May 2024
2 years 4 months San Francisco, United States
Staff Technical Program Manager
Kyte Systems
- Supervising four key technical initiatives across Engineering teams (as one example: geo-spatial data storage and processing).
- Establishing an alerting and on-call system that monitors the health of all frontend and backend systems and orchestrates the availability of 30 engineers, by skill set, timezone and team affiliation.
- Created a technical onboarding program for new Kyte engineers: Shortened onboarding time from 5-7 weeks to 3 weeks, increased onboarding satisfaction from 45% to 85%, established a technical knowledge base for self-paced learning.
May 2021 - Jan 2022
9 months San Francisco, United States
Sr. Backend Engineer – Algorithms & Inference Team
Kyte Systems
- Scaled the system for scheduling car delivery drivers to serve 13 US-markets, increasing driver satisfaction and on-time rate.
- Redesigned and built a customer verification system, validating driver licenses, financial transactions and court record data.
- Onboarded and mentored junior colleagues on team collaboration, code contributions and optimizing impact.
Mar 2019 - Apr 2021
2 years 2 months Sunnyvale, United States
Sr. Technical Program Manager – Maps/Environment Modeling/Planning
Mercedes-Benz R&D
- Co-lead together with Department Manager the technical roadmap and quarterly planning for the Maps/Environment Modeling/Path Planning teams for Mercedes-Benz’ L4 autonomous car project (80+ engineers/10 scrum teams/4 countries).
- Steered technical concept work efforts, e.g. for new vehicle prototypes, feature implementations, code quality, and SW architecture.
- Defined, coordinated and tracked the feature development for the autonomous fleet that got deployed to a public test phase in partnership with the City of San Jose, CA media coverage.
Oct 2018 - Mar 2019
6 months Sunnyvale, United States
Sr. Engineer Machine Learning – Environment Modeling
Mercedes-Benz R&D
- In addition to previous role, I built up ownership for technical components and responsibility for department-spanning tasks.
- Planned and executed development of ML-based algorithms through all stages: from first prototype, to testing, to fleet deployment.
- Headed the research strategy and code development for Traffic Light state estimation.
May 2017 - Sep 2018
1 year 5 months Sunnyvale, United States
Machine Learning Engineer – Environment Modeling
Mercedes-Benz R&D
- Working on Level 4 autonomous vehicles in the field of Scene Understanding & Prediction, Traffic Light Handling, High-Level Planning (using C++, ROS, Python, numpy, Tensorflow, custom frameworks).
- Software testing and evaluating using testing suites, simulation, and in-vehicle tests.
- Acquired various Daimler driver licenses and tested systems on prototype vehicles on test tracks and public road.
Dec 2016 - Apr 2017
5 months Munich, Germany
Visiting Researcher – Chair of Robotics, AI and Real-time Systems
TU Munich
- Facilitated data analysis from self-driving cars through novel methods to represent complex driving scenarios (“Velocity Grids”).
May 2016 - Dec 2016
8 months Sunnyvale, United States
Master’s Thesis Internship – Simulation and Vehicle Testing
Mercedes-Benz R&D
- Created a processing pipeline for the analysis of data recordings from autonomous vehicles.
- Designed and implemented deep learning algorithms to automatically identify specific driving scenarios. Published state-of-the-art results at IV2017.
Summary
- Software Experience building software systems along all stages: ideate, design, review, implement, test, deploy, monitor.
- Development Backend systems using Docker, Python, Flask, SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL, numpy, pandas etc.
- Testing on all levels (pytest, mocking, API testing)
- Defining system monitoring and alerting (DataDog, Sentry, PagerDuty)
- Robotics & Deep learning for autonomous systems, environment modeling, semantic scene interpretation
- Machine LearningRobotic system development with C++, ROS and custom frameworks
- Project Experienced managing engineering programs across time zones and business units (OKR tools, Jira, Gitlab)
- Management Leading teams using collaborative methods, while keeping sharp focus on project goals
- Defining, monitoring, actively steering and reporting project KPI’s
- Communication Strong communicator, comfortable with public speaking, moderating discussions, and leading workshops
Languages
German
Native
English
Advanced
French
Intermediate
Education
Technical University of Munich & UPMC Paris
MSc · Mechanical Engineering · Paris, France
Technical University of Munich & BCIT Vancouver
BSc · Engineering Science · Vancouver, Canada
Certifications & licenses
Daimler Driver Licenses
Daimler
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