Master/Bachelor – Vehicle Software Architectures (f/m/d)

Salary: 24.500 - 44.500 € per year

Requirements:

We are looking for someone pursuing academic studies in a relevant technical or engineering field, such as Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Automotive Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, Mechatronics, Control Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Technical Business Administration, or a similar field.

We value an interest in automated driving, software architectures, and agentic AD/LLM-based concepts.

We expect basic knowledge of literature research and academic referencing, such as BibTeX, Zotero, or systematic screening.

We value a structured, analytical working style and precise documentation in English and German.

Basic programming skills, for example in Python or C++, and experience in open-source communities are beneficial.

Responsibilities:

Together, we will refine the topic and formulate precise research questions.

We will conduct a systematic literature search using sources such as IEEE, ACM, arXiv, and Google Scholar, screen studies, and extract relevant data.

We will develop a taxonomy of end-to-end, modular, and agentic architectures, covering roles, orchestration, tool use, and safety and runtime aspects.

We will compare open-source automated-driving stacks, analyzing architecture layers, middleware such as ROS 2 and CyberRT, APIs, roadmaps, releases, licensing and governance, community metrics, and maturity levels.

We will map agentic automated-driving concepts, including agent roles, communication patterns, knowledge integration such as RAG, and integration points within existing stacks.

We will compile an overview of relevant benchmarks and datasets, especially for scenarios such as parking or docking.

We will create evidence syntheses, comparison tables, and visualizations, and derive guidelines and research gaps.

We will contribute to scientific writing in German and English and prepare the final presentation.

Technologies:

Apollo

LLM

Python

RAG

ROS

Robotics

Architect

More:

We are the Institute of Vehicle Concepts (FK) at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), internationally recognised for designing future road and rail vehicles that enable climate- and environmentally friendly mobility while remaining affordable and user-friendly. We research and demonstrate the necessary key technologies and work closely with scientific institutions, industry, and political bodies. In this role, we will work with our team on a systematic survey of software architectures for automated driving, focusing on end-to-end approaches, modular pipelines, and agentic AD systems, including LLM-based, tool-using agents and orchestration. We will develop an architectural taxonomy, analyze relevant open-source stacks such as Autoware and Baidu Apollo, and derive technological trends, gaps, and actionable recommendations. Remuneration is according to German TVöD 05.

last updated 39 week of 2026