Cognigear
Platform Engineering

Internal Autonomy Platform & Toolkit Design

Stop rebuilding the wheel. Create a shared internal platform (middleware, tooling, CI/CD) for your autonomy teams.

Timeline
8 Weeks to Value
Typical Engagement
$80k–$200k
Focus Areas
R&D fleets

Internal Autonomy Platform & Toolkit Design

Your smartest engineers shouldn't be writing log parsers. Build a paved road for your autonomy developers so they can focus on the AI.

  • Standardize the "Inner Loop" (Code → Build → Sim → Debug)
  • Create a shared library of common components (Drivers, Math, Geometry)
  • Implement a robust Data Platform for managing petabytes of logs

Who this is for

Platform Engineering Leads, VPs of Software, and CTOs at:

  • Scaling autonomy companies (Series B+)
  • Large OEMs producing multiple autonomous product lines
  • Research labs moving to production

Operational context

This engagement focuses on:

  • Developer Experience (DX) – CLI tools, One-command setup, Documentation
  • Middleware – ROS/ROS2 wrappers, Deterministic message passing, Zero-copy shared memory
  • Data – Lakehouse architecture, Querying engines, Visualization tools

Trigger phrases you might be saying

  • “It takes a new hire 3 weeks to set up their laptop.”
  • “Every team writes their own driver for the same LiDAR.”
  • “We can't replay logs from 6 months ago because the format changed.”
  • “Our cloud bill is exploding because we store everything in S3 hot storage.”

Business outcomes

  • Accelerated R&D velocity
  • Reduced "Bus Factor" (removing dependency on the one person who knows how the build works)
  • Lower infrastructure costs through optimization
  • Higher code quality through automated linting and testing standards

What we deliver

  • Platform Architecture Blueprint (Services, Tools, Infra)
  • "Golden Path" Developer Workflow definition
  • Core Library design (Common utilities)
  • Data Lake Strategy (Tiering, Indexing, formats like MCAP/Rosbag2)
  • Build System optimization plan (Bazel, Docker caching)

How it works

  1. Audit – Assess the current "pain" in the development lifecycle
  2. Architect – Design the platform components to solve the biggest bottlenecks
  3. Evangelize – Help roll out the new tools to the engineering team

Timeline & effort

  • Duration: 8-12 weeks
  • Client time: Interviews with developers, access to codebase and CI/CD pipelines
  • Data: Build logs, cloud usage reports

Pricing bands

Fixed-fee: $80k–$200k, depending on:

  • Team size (scalability needs)
  • Current tech debt levels
  • Scope (just Build/CI vs. full Data Platform)

Tech stack & integrations

  • Build: Bazel, CMake, Docker, Nix
  • CI/CD: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins
  • Data: Foxglove, Rosbag2, MCAP, Parquet, Iceberg
  • Cloud: AWS (EKS, S3), GCP (GKE, GCS), Azure

Risks & safeguards

We explicitly design for:

  • Adoption – ensuring the new platform is actually easier to use than the old hacks
  • Abstraction leaks – ensuring the platform doesn't hide too much complexity needed for debugging
  • Maintenance – designing tools that don't require a dedicated team of 50 to keep running

Site examples

  • Robotics Unicorn (USA) – Architected a "Vehicle-in-the-Cloud" platform that allowed developers to spin up a virtual robot with one command, reducing integration testing time from days to minutes.
  • AgTech OEM (Europe) – Unified 5 different product lines onto a single "Core Autonomy SDK," increasing code reuse from 10% to 60%.

Frequently asked questions

Do you build the platform? We design and prototype it. We can work with your Infra team or bring in partners to build the heavy production-grade backend.

Why not just use ROS? ROS is a middleware, not a platform. You still need build tools, deployment scripts, log management, and testing frameworks around it.

Is this only for big teams? If you have >10 software engineers, you need a platform. Otherwise, you lose 20-30% of your time to "tooling tax".

Target KPIs

  • ↑New developer onboarding time
  • ↑Build time / Deploy time
  • ↑Code reuse %
  • ↑Infrastructure cost per developer
  • ↑Platform uptime

Deployed Environments

Engineering labs

Ready to start?

Book a 15-minute technical scoping call to discuss your fleet requirements.

Book Scoping Call

Related Services

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End-to-End Autonomy System Architecture Design

Design the full autonomy stack: perception → localization → prediction → planning → control → safety layer → teleop → data platform.

Recommended Next Step

Autonomy Make–Buy–Partner Strategy

Decide which parts of the autonomy stack to build, license, or partner for (perception, planning, control, teleop, data).