High aspirations require strong foundations. At Torc, the Infrastructure & Tools team is tasked with creating and maintaining the foundational systems on which the rest of the organization depends. The team is composed of cross-functional, multi-disciplinary software professionals who are dedicated to creating the infrastructure, web applications, and backend tools that enable testing and data analysis for our self-driving vehicles. Each plays a unique role in helping to realize Torc’s mission of making the world safer.
From the Road to the Cloud
You might not notice the Infrastructure & Tools team while making your way through Torc Robotics HQ. That’s because much of their work takes place behind the scenes of this self-driving vehicle company. They provide the backbone for testing ops, working to solve the problems of scalability and reliability in the self-driving truck space. From on-vehicle troubleshooting to large-scale cloud deployments, they construct cutting-edge solutions that empower engineers to build, deploy, test and analyze autonomous software.
On-vehicle Computing
The Infrastructure & Tools team works closely with test engineers to ensure that the on-vehicle computing hardware meets performance requirements. They use industry-standard tools and services to manage our builds and deployments, including Git, Jenkins, Ansible, and Docker. They are actively involved in the design of next-generation hardware systems in the self-driving vehicles. It is up to them to ensure a stable on-vehicle computing platform to reliably support increasing on-road testing requirements.
Cloud Infrastructure
The team is responsible for provisioning, configuring and deploying simulation environments and log analysis pipelines to cloud compute and storage platforms. Log analysis of petabyte-scale real-world vehicle test data and auto-scaling of simulation tasks requires innovative techniques to balance trade offs between cost and performance by creating ephemeral instances when cloud provider demand is low and on-demand instances for time-sensitive tasks.