Principal Engineer - Motion Planning

Motional is on the lookout for a highly skilled Principal Engineer to join our Planning team. In this pivotal role, you will be responsible for designing innovative motion planning and control systems that ensure the safe, efficient, and comfortable operation of our autonomous fleet in intricate environments. We seek an individual with a strong background in advanced algorithm development and robust software engineering, committed to shaping production-ready autonomous vehicles. If you are passionate about autonomous driving and enjoy tackling real-world challenges in a dynamic field, we welcome your application.Key Responsibilities:Lead the research and development of groundbreaking algorithms and subsystems for motion planning within autonomous driving, enhancing the Operational Design Domain. This encompasses advanced search-based and geometry-driven methods, alongside decision-making under uncertainty, with a focus on probabilistic techniques.Oversee cross-functional initiatives to create or enhance interfaces aimed at solving complex problems.Continuously monitor system performance to pinpoint areas for enhancement and formulate technical strategies to address shortcomings.Guide cross-functional project teams to deliver comprehensive solutions, showcasing the ability to think beyond the planning system's limitations.Architect and integrate sophisticated motion planning and prediction algorithms, leading their assessment and optimization for real-world applications.Design and develop a resilient, scalable, and high-performance codebase that enables rapid exploration, prototyping, and thorough evaluation of new motion planning methodologies and algorithms.Facilitate technical collaboration and ensure seamless integration with upstream perception and prediction components, as well as downstream trajectory optimization, tracking, and control systems, guaranteeing optimal end-to-end system performance.Utilize your extensive software development and research expertise to mentor others in best software practices, fostering a culture of technical excellence.Mentor junior and senior team members, promoting a culture of product-focused engineering, rigorous research, and advanced development.

Principal Engineer and Team Lead - Motion Planning Join our innovative Planning team at Motional, where your enthusiasm for robotics and software development will contribute to the advancement of production-ready autonomous vehicles. As the Principal Engineer and Team Lead, you will oversee a talented team dedicated to designing and implementing state-of-the-art motion planning software for autonomous vehicles. This pivotal role requires you to lead the definition of motion planning and control systems that ensure our fleet operates safely, efficiently, and comfortably in complex environments. Your leadership will be instrumental in developing cutting-edge motion planning algorithms, working in collaboration with cross-functional teams (Localization, Perception, Prediction, Controls, ML Products, and Systems Engineering), and mentoring a diverse group of engineers to deliver groundbreaking solutions. If you are driven by a passion for autonomous driving, enjoy tackling challenging real-world problems, and are eager to make a significant impact in a rapidly evolving industry, we would love to hear from you.

Join our dynamic Motion Planning team at Motional, where your enthusiasm for robotics and software engineering will help shape the future of autonomous vehicles. In this pivotal role, you will conduct research, develop innovative algorithms, and create software that ensures safe, comfortable, and user-friendly navigation.Key Responsibilities:Design and implement diverse algorithms for autonomous driving, covering search-based methods, sampling-based techniques, optimization strategies, linear-temporal logic, and decision-making in uncertain environments.Integrate and assess various motion planning and prediction algorithms for optimal performance.Create a robust and scalable codebase that facilitates swift testing and evaluation of different motion planning methodologies.Collaborate with perception, prediction, trajectory optimization, and control components to enhance system performance.Engage in code reviews and mentorship opportunities with experienced team members to foster professional growth.Promote a culture centered on product-driven engineering, research, and development.

Mission Overview: As a Principal Engineer and Technical Lead at Motional, you will spearhead a dynamic team dedicated to creating and implementing advanced trajectory planning algorithms through numerical optimization for autonomous vehicles. You will play a pivotal role in designing the motion planning and control systems that empower our fleet to navigate through intricate environments with safety, efficiency, and comfort. As a vital leader, you will not only enhance the development and performance of innovative trajectory generation algorithms but also collaborate with multidisciplinary teams including Planning, Perception, Prediction, Localization, Machine Learning Products, and Systems Engineering. Additionally, you will mentor a skilled group of engineers to deliver cutting-edge solutions. If you are enthusiastic about autonomous driving and wish to contribute to our commercial launch this year, enjoy tackling challenging real-world problems, and are eager to make a profound impact in a rapidly evolving domain, we invite you to connect with us! Your Responsibilities: Lead and expand a high-impact trajectory planning team, defining its technical vision, execution strategy, and long-term organizational role within the Motion organization. Prepare for commercial launch readiness by enhancing on-road driving behavior (safety, comfort, assertiveness) across the fleet through feature expansion, continuous performance improvements, and innovative methodologies. Utilize a systematic, metrics-driven approach to measure and enhance on-road performance. Advocate for the use of existing training and evaluation pipelines to ensure scalable, production-ready delivery. Oversee the computational efficiency and real-time performance of trajectory generation algorithms, ensuring compliance with latency budgets. Direct the swift triage and root-cause analysis of critical fleet incidents, translating real-world edge cases into immediate algorithmic enhancements and validation sets. Manage the successful execution of complex, multi-team projects, ensuring technical alignment from design to deployment while upholding a rigorous standard for testing and validation to meet the high safety benchmarks required for our commercial launch. Collaborate with peer leads to provide technical leadership, making crucial decisions regarding architectural direction, strategic investments, tactical execution, and technical debt reduction. Ensure technical excellence through thorough design and code reviews, while actively fostering the professional growth and mentorship of your engineering team. Set and pursue ambitious goals that inspire the team to deliver industry-leading trajectory solutions.

Join our dynamic Motion Planning team where your enthusiasm for robotics and software development will drive the innovation of production-ready autonomous vehicles. In this pivotal role, you will conduct cutting-edge research, design algorithms, and develop software that crafts safe, efficient, and user-friendly routes and motions for autonomous systems.Key Responsibilities:Develop and implement advanced algorithms for autonomous driving, including search-based, sampling-based, optimization-based methods, and decision-making under uncertainty.Integrate various motion planning and prediction algorithms, assessing their effectiveness in real-time scenarios.Design and maintain a robust and scalable codebase to facilitate swift exploration and evaluation of diverse motion planning methodologies.Collaborate with upstream perception and prediction components, as well as downstream trajectory optimization and control systems.Engage in code reviews and mentor junior team members to foster a culture of excellence and continuous improvement.Promote a product-focused engineering culture through innovative research and development initiatives.

Mission: We are looking for an exceptional Principal Engineer and Technical Lead to spearhead our extensive AI model and software evaluation framework known as Ground Truth Regression. The ideal candidate will possess a robust background in data engineering and machine learning principles, along with proven leadership experience in creating and deploying sophisticated data analysis and large-scale orchestration frameworks. At Motional, orchestrating large-scale data analysis is essential for the development of our machine learning-driven autonomous vehicles. Our robo-taxi ML models and software are crafted by a diverse team of developers and deployed multiple times daily. The Ground Truth Regression team is responsible for providing a comprehensive perception analysis framework that validates any modifications affecting the behavior of our autonomous vehicles. The GTRegression team assesses the overall impact of ML and software modifications on the autonomous vehicle during the development phase, equipping the team with tools for root cause analysis and safety assessments. We actively monitor for model errors, anomalies, rare objects, and long-tail driving scenarios across thousands of driving hours. Our team is responsible for developing the complete stack, including AWS Kubernetes orchestration frameworks, re-simulation tools, model metrics, regression reports, and in-depth analysis UIs. We collaborate closely with other perception and ML teams to define metrics and analyze outcomes.

Join our innovative Behaviors team focused on Prediction and Machine Learning Planning at Motional, where you will collaborate with leading ML engineers dedicated to transforming self-driving vehicles into a reality and making a positive impact on society. Our team develops advanced machine learning models that understand how various agents navigate intricate, real-world traffic environments. These models are pivotal in directing the behavior of our autonomous vehicles while also predicting the actions of other entities like vehicles and vulnerable road users. We are on the lookout for exceptional leaders and technical specialists who are deeply passionate about Level 4 autonomous driving technology. If you thrive on intellectual challenges and seek to advance your career within a rapidly growing organization, we want to hear from you!

Join our innovative Behaviors team at Motional, where you will work alongside leading ML engineers dedicated to advancing self-driving technology and making a meaningful social impact. Our team specializes in developing sophisticated machine learning models that enable autonomous vehicles to navigate real-world traffic scenarios effectively. These models inform our vehicle's behavior and predict interactions with other road users, including vehicles and pedestrians.We are seeking exceptional leaders and technical experts passionate about Level 4 autonomous driving technology. If you thrive on intellectual challenges and wish to accelerate your career with a dynamic, rapidly growing company, we want to hear from you!Your Responsibilities:Define and oversee motion planning and prediction projects aimed at enhancing the safety, comfort, and legality of our self-driving vehicles in complex traffic environments.Lead, mentor, and expand a talented team of engineers.Design and implement advanced behavior models utilizing cutting-edge machine learning, generative AI, and reinforcement learning techniques.Transition solutions into production and deploy them across our fleet of autonomous vehicles.Collaborate with perception, simulation, data platforms, and integration teams to validate and optimize the performance of your solutions in real-world scenarios.Communicate strategies, progress, and challenges to the executive leadership team.

Mission Overview: Join us as a distinguished Staff/Principal Engineer specializing in Perception Capabilities, where you will spearhead the development of innovative software solutions leveraging advanced computer vision and deep learning technologies. Your extensive experience will encompass key areas such as detection, classification, segmentation, and tracking, alongside critical support functions, including data engines, labeling policies, training pipelines, model optimization, simulation, and testing. You are motivated by the tangible impact of your work, taking initiative and ownership of outcomes. In this role, you'll have the opportunity to apply your expertise to the perception stack of autonomous vehicles, navigating the unique challenges inherent in safety-critical, open-world applications while ensuring engineering excellence and thorough evaluation. As a creative problem solver, you'll collaborate with interdisciplinary teams focused on capability enhancement to design, implement, and validate comprehensive solutions.

Join the Motion Planning team at Zoox, where your expertise will enhance the driving behaviors of our autonomous robots on public roads. As a Senior/Staff Software Engineer, you will be responsible for developing algorithms that determine the robot's navigation paths and ensure safe operation in complex environments, such as the bustling streets of Downtown San Francisco and the vibrant Las Vegas Strip. Collaboration is key; you will work alongside experts in Planning, Perception, Prediction, and Operations to drive the next wave of innovations in autonomous driving. At Zoox, safety is paramount, so you will implement well-researched modifications to the Planner, conduct rigorous testing in simulations and closed environments, and partner with our safety drivers during on-road trials.

Mission Summary:We are looking for a highly skilled and innovative Principal Engineer to take the helm as Tech Lead Manager for our newly established Machine Learning (ML) Acceleration team. This critical position will spearhead the strategy, development, and implementation of initiatives designed to dramatically enhance the training speed of ML models. Our ultimate aim is to significantly shorten the development cycle for new ML models and facilitate rapid hot-patching for challenges encountered in our autonomous vehicle services.As a hands-on leader, you will merge extensive technical knowledge in ML systems and performance optimization with exceptional leadership and management capabilities. You will be responsible for recruiting, mentoring, and nurturing a high-performing team of engineers, while cultivating a culture of innovation, teamwork, and ongoing enhancement.Key Responsibilities:Team Leadership & Management:Establish, direct, and oversee a top-performing team of ML and infrastructure engineers dedicated to acceleration initiatives.Provide technical direction, mentorship, and professional growth opportunities for team members.Encourage a collaborative and inclusive team atmosphere.Set team objectives, priorities, and operational roadmap in alignment with organizational goals.Technical Strategy & Execution:Articulate the technical vision and strategy for ML acceleration throughout the organization.Identify and assess state-of-the-art technologies and methodologies for expediting ML training, including data pipeline optimization, large-scale distributed training, data loader optimization, hardware acceleration, and model optimization techniques.Design, develop, and implement scalable and efficient ML acceleration solutions.Cross-functional Collaboration:Work closely with ML research, ML training platforms, and product teams to comprehend their requirements and seamlessly integrate acceleration solutions.Effectively communicate complex technical concepts and strategies to both technical and non-technical audiences.Serve as a technical expert and advocate for ML acceleration projects across the organization.Impact & Measurement:Regularly assess and report on the effectiveness of acceleration initiatives.Continuously pursue opportunities for further optimization and innovation.

Mission Overview: We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Software Engineer to spearhead the development and execution of automated workflows, advanced tooling, and insightful analytics that will empower our autonomy stack to achieve unparalleled scalability. Your expertise will be crucial in transforming vast datasets into actionable engineering insights, ensuring that our software releases are resilient, thoroughly validated, and prepared for real-world deployment. Key Responsibilities: Design Intelligent Tooling: Lead the design and implementation of sophisticated automation systems aimed at categorizing and elucidating complex system behaviors using advanced data modeling techniques to expedite solution delivery. Drive Analytical Initiatives: Take charge of developing impactful performance visualization tools that convert raw metrics into clear, actionable insights related to on-road performance. Enhance Release Engineering: Leverage your experience to refine our release processes, steering the team towards a highly automated deployment framework that upholds quality while boosting efficiency. Advance Simulation Techniques: Play a pivotal role in enhancing our virtual testing environments, ensuring our simulation suites deliver the high-fidelity feedback necessary to accurately interpret releases. Collaborate Across Disciplines: Engage within a large, multi-disciplinary codebase to facilitate seamless integration between planning, motion, and control teams. Qualifications: Substantial experience in building production-grade applications, tools, and pipelines using Python. Proficient in navigating and contributing to large, complex codebases where modularity and thorough documentation are essential. Demonstrated success in delivering software in a production environment, with familiarity in CI/CD practices, version control at scale, and rigorous release cycles. Strong curiosity about data, with the capability to extract meaningful patterns from complex, high-dimensional datasets. A deep passion for a driverless future, with an understanding of the critical nature of deploying software that interacts with the physical environment. Bonus Qualifications (not mandatory): Experience with C++ in a Linux environment. Familiarity with Machine Learning frameworks or Large Language Model (LLM) integration. A background in robotics middleware (ROS, DDS) or autonomous systems.

Join Motional as a Senior Software Engineer focused on enhancing the performance metrics of autonomous vehicles. In this pivotal role, you will leverage your expertise to improve vehicle performance and optimize metrics that ensure safety and efficiency in autonomous driving.

Join Our Team: At Motional, our mission is to revolutionize transportation through the development of autonomous vehicles. As part of our cutting-edge team, you will collaborate with top-tier machine learning engineers and research scientists to bring self-driving technology to life, making a positive impact on society. We focus on creating advanced tech stacks that analyze complex driving environments and generate safe, comfortable trajectories for our robotaxi services using state-of-the-art deep neural networks.Your Role:As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer specializing in prediction, you will play a pivotal role in training, evaluating, and deploying our machine learning models for scene understanding, behavior prediction, and planning. Your daily responsibilities will include:Designing and conducting high-impact experiments through collaboration with fellow machine learning engineers.Prototyping and enhancing metrics for assessing the performance of our behavioral models across various scenarios and capabilities.Ensuring timely updates of major models, including detailed analysis of offline and on-road evaluation data.Staying abreast of the latest industry trends, proposing innovative architectures and network designs based on current literature.Maintaining a robust training and evaluation codebase, particularly focusing on dataset generation and evaluation.

Mission: We are in search of a talented and driven Senior Data Engineering Analyst to join our innovative team focused on large-scale AI model evaluation through our platform, Ground Truth Regression. The ideal candidate will possess a solid foundation in data engineering, machine learning principles, and statistical analysis. At Motional, the orchestration of extensive data analysis is crucial for advancing our machine learning-driven autonomous driving technology. Our robo-taxi ML models and software are developed by a dedicated team of engineers and deployed multiple times daily. The Ground Truth Regression team is responsible for providing a comprehensive perception analysis framework to validate any changes that could influence the behavior of autonomous vehicles. The Ground Truth Regression team assesses the cumulative effects of ML and software modifications during the development phase, equipping the team with tools for root cause analysis and safety evaluations. We meticulously monitor model errors, anomalies, and rare occurrences across extensive driving scenarios, gathering insights over thousands of driving hours. The team is responsible for developing the full-stack infrastructure, including AWS Kubernetes orchestration, re-simulation, model metrics, regression reports, and deep-dive analytical tools. Collaboration with other perception and ML teams is integral for establishing metrics and analyzing outcomes. What You’ll Do: Collaborate with ML Engineers and Autonomy Software Developers to create new data analysis metrics and KPIs for validating autonomous vehicle performance. Pursue innovation by researching and developing new large-scale data analysis frameworks. Lead large-scale data analysis workflows to identify unexpected impacts of both planned and unplanned modifications to ML models and software. Construct high-quality datasets to enhance ML product performance through training and edge case validation. Deliver in-depth statistical insights on model performance and generalization through thorough error and change analysis. What We’re Looking For: Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related field. Proficient programming skills in Python, SciPy, and related data analysis frameworks. Experience in machine learning, data mining, and statistical analysis. Familiarity with large-scale data processing and distributed computing technologies. Strong communication and software development skills, including goal setting, design documentation, testing frameworks, and collaborative team development.

Mission Overview: At Motional, we are revolutionizing the way autonomous vehicles extract vital insights from extensive multimodal sensor data. Our advanced autonomous driving architecture relies on identifying rare edge cases, long-tail scenarios, and significant model inaccuracies. Our innovative framework, Omnitag, serves as the driving force behind this data discovery. In your role as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer within the Data Mining team, you will be tasked with creating the "Brain" of this framework: designing large-scale multimodal Teacher models that interpret the world and refining them into hyper-efficient Student models capable of analyzing exabytes of data in near real-time. You will operate at the crossroads of large-scale representation learning, retrieval optimization, and reasoning systems. Your contributions will profoundly impact how we encapsulate knowledge into streamlined encoders for rapid searches, as well as how we utilize reinforcement learning to enhance data discovery processes and intelligent querying. By developing smarter mining tools, you will expedite the entire model enhancement lifecycle for teams engaged in post-training evaluations, error diagnostics, and dataset refinement.

Motional is developing autonomous driving technology with an emphasis on safety, reliability, and accessibility. Backed by Hyundai Motor Group, the company is working toward the commercial launch of fully driverless IONIQ 5 robotaxis in Las Vegas, aiming to advance AI-driven transportation and improve road safety. The Systems Readiness and Performance team connects software development with real-world deployment. This group manages system design, verification, and validation for the autonomy stack, setting and measuring performance targets, and building the safety case for commercial deployment. The Autonomy Subsystems team is responsible for designing and evaluating autonomy software modules. As a Senior Engineer, Autonomy ML Systems based in Boston, you will focus on strengthening evaluation processes for machine learning subsystems. The role covers offline model evaluations, open and closed-loop re-simulations, and on-road performance assessments. The main objective is to develop meaningful metrics, validate subsystem performance, and provide actionable feedback to machine learning developers. Collaboration across teams is essential to improve in-vehicle machine learning models as Motional prepares to scale its robotaxi service. Key Responsibilities Define, prototype, and validate advanced metrics to provide new insights into model performance, especially for perception, prediction, and planning subsystems. Review the coverage of current training and testing data, and curate test sets that represent Motional’s operational design domain, including agent types, scenarios, and spatial factors. Assess machine learning model performance using established metrics and curated tests. Analyze large-scale data from on-road and simulation events to evaluate system-level performance and understand how each subsystem contributes. Set performance requirements for autonomy subsystems and confirm those requirements are met. Requirements Experience designing and evaluating safety-critical systems and machine learning models. Interest in autonomy, robotics, and machine learning.

Mission Summary The AI Data Foundry serves as the critical bridge linking our extensive data resources with the engineering teams that depend on them. We design and manage the essential services and infrastructure required to convert petabytes of raw data monthly into actionable insights for our Machine Learning and Autonomy engineers. This position is pivotal in driving our core initiatives: Data Processing: We are developing cutting-edge infrastructure to accommodate the demands of our rapidly expanding fleet and advanced ML engineering needs. Your responsibility will be to ensure that our core data pipelines are robustly engineered—performant, user-friendly, and highly fault-tolerant. Data Discovery: We are creating a platform that integrates data cataloging for search capabilities across our metadata stores, vector datastores, and various data warehouses to enhance our ML pipelines. You will collaborate with ML and autonomy stakeholders to develop this new discovery platform. Data Lineage: We are initiating the construction of our data lineage system to track data usage at Motional. You will partner with our stakeholders to ensure the widespread adoption of our system and address user pain points. What You'll Be Doing Playing a key role in designing and building the next generation of data infrastructure. Building scalable backend services for data discovery and data lineage systems. Writing high-quality, maintainable code to process petabytes of data. Leading and advocating for high-level system design and conducting quality code reviews and technical contributions. Designing, building, and maintaining scalable data processing and access using cloud ETL technologies.

Role overview Motional is hiring a Staff Front End Engineer for the Web Visualization Tooling team in Boston, Massachusetts. This role focuses on building web-based tools and visualization platforms that help machine learning engineers gather feedback and enhance the performance of autonomous vehicle systems. What you will do Establish cross-team standards and best practices for web development. Coordinate with multiple teams to keep projects on track and aligned with requirements. Architect and scale a frontend ecosystem using React, TypeScript, and Vue. Work closely with teams in machine learning, frontend, UX, data services, data mining, and data annotation to ensure tools match real-world needs. Develop UI systems for a variety of internal stakeholders. Design user experiences tailored for complex, data-heavy workflows. Promote performance, scalability, and maintainability in frontend systems. Deliver products quickly and iterate in a product-focused setting. Requirements Experience designing and building user-facing visual applications with a strong emphasis on user experience. Deep expertise in React, TypeScript, and modern frontend architectures. Proficiency in Vue.js. Understanding of product design, usability, and user experience principles. High sense of ownership and ability to work autonomously. Strong organizational skills and a willingness to learn. Ability to mentor and delegate to engineers at different levels. Consistent approach to technical design and documentation. Comfort working directly with customers to identify needs and deliver solutions. Bonus skills Project management experience, especially with agile methodologies and operational excellence. Commitment to continuous delivery of value. Experience with backend systems such as Node.js or Python. Background in game development or 3D visualization. Work environment Motional offers a hybrid work schedule, supporting a mix of in-office and remote work.

Join Motional's cutting-edge team at our global headquarters located at 100 Northern Avenue in Boston, MA. Situated in the lively Seaport district, our office boasts stunning views of Boston Harbor and is conveniently close to major transit lines, a variety of restaurants, and popular attractions.Mission Overview:At Motional, our CORE team is at the forefront of developing our vehicle's Compute and Onboard Runtime Environment. We are dedicated to creating a leading AI compute platform for autonomous vehicles, executing the software and neural networks crucial for vehicle autonomy.The Next-Gen Technologies team, a key part of CORE, operates at the intersection of software engineering, machine learning, sensors, and hardware compute platforms to advance Motional's onboard vehicle architecture. If you are a passionate software engineer excited about embedded AI hardware and software systems, we would love to connect with you!Your Role:As a Senior Engineer on the Next-Gen Technologies team, you will play a vital role in enhancing the compute performance of our autonomous driving systems, contributing to the entire development lifecycle from ideation to proofs-of-concept to production.Your Responsibilities:Specialize in ML model deployment, integration of multiple ML models, and optimization on embedded compute platforms.Deep dive into the complete ML software stack, analyzing workload performance across various hardware processors, optimizing ML models, and enhancing ML software to continuously improve our stack with efficient approaches.Design, develop, test, integrate, and optimize software tools on diverse ML compute architectures.Collaborate with experts in perception, prediction, and other autonomous driving areas to enable algorithms on GPU, NPU, and other ML accelerator architectures.Optimize GPU/NPU resource utilization and manage sharing across multiple programs on the same system.Lead design initiatives to assess system needs and enhance our ML software stack accordingly.Provide technical guidance to peers and management.