Klemens Esterle
Senior Machine Learning Engineer at BMW Group
Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolKlemens Esterle is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer in Munich with nine years of experience building production-grade autonomy systems where safety, constraints, and robustness trump benchmark gains. He developed the motion planning algorithm behind BMW’s first Level 3 automated driving system and now applies ML to learn driving behavior from human data, contributing to work published at L4DC 2024. His Ph.D. in Robotics and a strong foundation in optimization and applied ML enable him to translate research into reliable, real-world systems—from L4 valet parking prototypes to multi-agent simulation tooling. He has led industry research projects, co-developed the open-source BARK simulation suite, and has 11 peer-reviewed papers with 370+ citations—evidence of both academic impact and engineering delivery. Known for pragmatic engineering, he bridges simulation, MPC, and imitation learning to push autonomy from lab demonstrations into safety-critical production.
9 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor's Degree Computer Science, Doctor's Degree Computer Science at Technical University of MunichMaster's Degree Mechatronics Engineering, Master's Degree Mechatronics Engineering at Technische Universität DresdenThe University of Sheffield
English, French
Github Skills (35)
simulation10
algorithms10
benchmark10
artificial-intelligence10
robotics10
simulator10
machine-learning10
verification10
multi-agent10
benchmarking10
reinforcement-learning10
autonomous-vehicles10
self-driving-car10
deep-reinforcement-learning10
autonomous-driving10
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
bark-simulator/planner-rules-mcts
Apr 2020 - Jun 2021
Behavior planner fusing runtime verification on traffic rules with single- and multi-agent Monte Carlo Tree Search
Contributions:34 commits, 2 PRs, 4 pushes in 1 year 2 months
monte-carlo-tree-searchmulti-agent
fortiss/apollo
Jan 2021 - Dec 2021
Adaptions from fortiss to make apollo work on our prototype autonomous vehicle
Contributions:244 commits, 168 pushes, 11 branches in 10 months
apollo
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