The setting
's lets heavy mining trucks and equipment operate on their own at customer mine sites. It combines vehicle controls, sensors, computers and fleet software.
A control-interface change could restore haulage availability or introduce a new braking hazard.
The mine needs driverless trucks moving again, while the release must preserve trustworthy braking behavior across vehicle embodiments.
Who you’d be doing this for
“Dispatch keeps asking why these trucks are stopping mid-cycle, and I don’t have an answer I can stand behind.”
Jyoti Roy · Mine Operations Manager · a character in this brief
Responsible for fleet availability and safe material movement at the customer mine site.
What is at stake
Autonomous haul trucks are stopping after brake commands should have expired. You must choose a control-interface release that restores availability without accepting unverified braking behavior.
Why it isn’t already fixed
Every obvious fix costs something else. That’s the part you’d have to decide.
- fleet availability vs braking confidence
- controller containment vs interface correctness
- field urgency vs reproducible evidence
- vehicle-specific behavior vs reusable contracts
Why Applied Intuition
Drive-by-wire integration determines whether autonomous haul trucks can move material safely on active mine sites.
Written with these in mind
Not your kind of problem? 93 more at Applied Intuition, or browse every organization.
Where the organization context comes fromThe postings this brief was written from, and the reporting read before it.
The organization context comes from public information. The situation and characters are written for the brief.
Job postings it was written from
Public descriptions of the work at Applied Intuition. They are listed as sources, not as openings. The lines under a posting are its own words, where it meets this brief.
- Vehicle Controls - Technical Lead (opens in a new tab)
- Characterize the dynamics of customer vehicles across many embodiments — haul trucks, excavators, wheel loaders, dozers, and more — to create tailored controls solutions and close the gap between simulation and real-world behavior
- The systems you lead are high performance and safety-critical, operating under tight timing constraints on real machines in the field.
- Software Engineer - Control Center (opens in a new tab)
- Control Center acts as the central nervous system for autonomous operations, handling everything from continuous telemetry ingestion and real-time digital twins to mission orchestration, safety-critical geofencing, and site-wide path planning.
- As a Software Engineer on the Control Center team, you will build the central operational platform that connects autonomous vehicle fleets to human operators across a wide range of industries including mining, commercial trucking, defense, industrial automation, and consumer AVs.
- Software Engineer - Onboard Maps (opens in a new tab)
- Extend the loop offboard over time: aggregate divergence detections across fleet drive logs into map freshness and correction pipelines
- Our Localization, Calibration, and Mapping team delivers high-integrity solutions that let autonomous systems navigate with precision in real-time, safety-critical environments — across consumer automotive, trucking, mining, and construction.
- Software Engineer - C++ (opens in a new tab)
- Whether applying your experience to application-level onboard software in a modern C++ codebase powering on-road products or building systems that operate 200+ ton mining vehicles on deformable off-road terrain, you’ll play a key role in building the autonomy stack powering the next generation of intelligent vehicles.
- If you're motivated by complex systems, ownership across boundaries, and real-world impact, this is where architecture meets autonomy.
- Mechatronics Integration Engineer, Vehicle OS (opens in a new tab)
- Act as the primary technical expertise for firmware/mechatronics systems: triage issues, collect logs/telemetry, reproduce problems, and coordinate fixes with the Hardware/Firmware development team while keeping customers unblocked
- Own end-to-end product development process of Applied's autonomy and drive-by-wire system and lead integrations from initial setup through steady-state operations
This is the setup. The work is inside.
Running it puts you in the room: the full situation and its constraints, stakeholders who push back in their own words, and the decisions that are yours to make. What you produce becomes a Day One Plan — work you can show someone instead of describing.
Where similar work appears
Other live briefs connected to this one, and what connects them.
Similar problems at other organizations
Like this one, each of these turns on crossing a deadline that can't be undone.
A growing set of Dashcams shows cloud configuration that may not match installed firmware.
You have to weigh a durable release gate against a manual pin that protects the immediate rollout.
False trips appear in 4.8% of stationary equipment records, but some field evidence suggests the disputed signal is real.
You must weigh audit-ready corrections against losing valid movement history for off-highway equipment.
Ready orders are missing pickup windows when aircraft hold near tall obstacles despite clear-looking approaches.
You have to weigh conservative safety behavior against a release that keeps deliveries moving.
The same setting, from another role
Each is set around Applied Intuition’s Mining Autonomy and Drive-by-Wire System, written for a different role. They’re separate briefs, not the same scenario.
Older haul trucks wait in the workshop for custom autonomy installations.
You must decide what belongs in a common module and what remains truck-specific.
One haul truck leaves autonomous service when dust reaches its lidar enclosure.
You must choose what gets installed across six trucks before drilling makes the retrofit hard to undo.
One autonomous haul truck loses position on rough loaded routes.
You must weigh a tougher installation against service access and repeatable calibration.
Other problems with a similar purpose
In each of these, as in this one, the aim is to build high-assurance systems where a consequential change's correctness can be demonstrated, not merely hoped for.
Rehearsals show the routing works, but recall of sources varies by 0.9% and provenance records are incomplete.
You have to weigh the contractual launch against how much you verify before each matter moves.
The old encrypted store retires on a fixed date, and 6.9% of historical artifacts still lack a source record and retention decision.
You have to weigh speed against proof that reports stay reproducible.
The residency commitment you signed forces a one-way split of event data, and 9% of derived datasets still lean on labels a machine guessed.
With six weeks left, you weigh completeness by region against keeping analytics intact.