Who we are:
Glydways is reimagining what public transit can be. We believe that mobility is the gateway to opportunity—connecting people to housing, education, employment, commerce, and care. By making transportation more accessible, affordable, and sustainable, we empower communities to thrive and unlock economic and social prosperity.
Our mission is to revolutionize transit with a solution that delivers high capacity, exceptional user experiences, unmatched affordability, and minimal environmental impact.
The Glydways system is a groundbreaking network of carbon-neutral, interconnected transit pathways powered by standardized autonomous vehicles on dedicated roadways. Operating 24/7 with on-demand access, it offers personalized and efficient mobility—without the burden of heavy upfront infrastructure costs or ongoing taxpayer subsidies.
With Glydways, we’re building more than a transportation system; we’re creating a future where everyone, everywhere, has the freedom to move.
Meet the team:
The Vehicle Platform Engineering Team is responsible for the design, validation, and delivery of the Glydways Autonomous Transit Vehicle hardware to align with the installation of the Glydways mass transit system. The team works with internal engineering and vendors and is responsible to deliver a vehicle design that generates a fantastic experience for customers while meeting mass transit regulations and all performance criteria. The team works cross functionally with product design (Similar to studio engineering or product requirement team), test validation, external suppliers, and prototype and production manufacturers to design, develop, and build a unique vehicle architecture.
Roles & Responsibilities:
- Own the technical roadmap and product delivery for Glydways door and closure systems, including structures, mechanisms, rails, latches, seals, actuators, sensors, interfaces, electrical & electronic systems, and related software.
- Translate vehicle-level requirements into closure-system requirements, architectures, design decisions, verification plans, and acceptance criteria.
- Lead the design and integration of complex mechanisms, including kinematics, actuator selection, latch and hinge integration, packaging, tolerance definition, and interface management.
- Drive cross-functional alignment across mechanical, electrical, software, systems, product, safety, validation, manufacturing, quality, industrial design, and operations teams.
- Coordinate technical work with external engineering, manufacturing partners and suppliers, across Japan, the United States, and Europe.
- Lead prototype builds, vehicle integration, durability testing, root-cause investigations, design iterations, and production-readiness activities within a demanding development and build schedule.
- Anticipate manufacturing, assembly, service, quality, reliability, and cost challenges through design-for-manufacturability and design-for-assembly practices.
- Establish effective processes for requirements, issue tracking, design reviews, change management, documentation, and decision-making.
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:
- Significant experience developing automotive closures or complex mechanical and electromechanical systems through multiple product-development stages; sliding-door experience is highly valuable.
- Strong understanding of mechanism design, kinematics, actuators, latches, hinges, seals, tolerance management, design verification, and reliability.
- Experience collaborating with suppliers, manufacturing partners, and cross-functional teams in automotive, mobility, robotics, aerospace, or a similar complex-product environment.
- Strong communication, organization, judgment, and problem-solving skills, with the ability to work independently in an ambiguous and rapidly changing international and multicultural environment.
- Experience taking a closure system or complex mechanism from concept through sourcing, validation, production, and launch.
- Working knowledge of design for manufacturability, design for assembly, GD&T, tolerance analysis, FMEA, and quality-planning methods.
- Experience with CATIA, 3DX, or comparable CAD and PLM tools, at least DMU-level proficiency; experience using CAE tools for product development is a plus.
- Professional fluency in English; Japanese language skills are a plus.
- Willingness and ability to travel internationally, including extended collaboration or assignments in Japan and the United States, as business needs require.
Glydways provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
Skills Required
- Significant experience developing automotive closures or complex mechanical and electromechanical systems through multiple product-development stages
- Experience with mechanism design, kinematics, actuators, latches, hinges, seals, tolerance management, design verification, and reliability
- Experience collaborating with suppliers, manufacturing partners, and cross-functional teams in automotive, mobility, robotics, aerospace, or similar complex-product environments
- Experience taking a closure system or complex mechanism from concept through sourcing, validation, production, and launch
- Working knowledge of design for manufacturability, design for assembly, GD&T, tolerance analysis, FMEA, and quality-planning methods
- CATIA, 3DX, or comparable CAD and PLM tools, with at least DMU-level proficiency
- Professional fluency in English
- Willingness and ability to travel internationally, including extended collaboration or assignments in Japan and the United States
- Sliding-door experience
- Experience using CAE tools for product development
- Japanese language skills
What We Do
Glydways, Inc. is an American transportation technology and clean energy company based in South San Francisco, CA. The company specializes in the design, manufacture, installation and operation of affordable autonomous transportation for low, medium and extremely high capacity needs. Founded in 2016 by engineer and entrepreneur Mark Seeger, the company was started with the goal of providing affordable mobility for communities across the world. This goal is founded in the belief that access to affordable housing, employment, education and care lead to economic and social prosperity, and the key to this equity is mobility for as many people as possible. Lead by Gokul Hemmady who serves as CEO, the company’s core objectives are to provide a 24/7 mobility service solution that is environmentally net-negative in terms of greenhouse gas production (GHG), and, inherently profitable. GHG-negative is achieved through the invention and use of power-efficient technologies to reduce the watt-hours-per-person-per-unit-distance traveled, and, photovoltaics embedded into the infrastructure. Economic sustainability is achieved by designing for operational costs that are inherently lower than revenue collected when selling a ride. The key comes from decoupling the unit-costs from the utilization of the system, something that is not possible with existing public/mass transportation systems. By being financially sustainable, Glydways relieves municipalities of the vast annual subsidies required to operate existing solutions, which are inherently unprofitable and thereby a fiscal burden to public budgets. Further, the Glydways business model allows for private capitalization of entire systems. Glydways provides the highest capacity, at the lowest cost, with the best user experience, and the lowest greenhouse gas footprint of any mobility solution, providing a personal, on-demand, and point-to-point journey with no stops between origin and destination
