Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Motional is a driverless technology company developing safe, reliable, and accessible autonomous vehicles. The Principal Software Engineer will technically anchor the AI Data Engine team, defining architecture and driving initiatives that accelerate ML dataset generation and data warehouse capabilities. The role provides hands-on technical leadership, mentors engineers, and collaborates across ML research, training platform, and data engineering teams.
Responsibilities
- Serve as the technical anchor for a high-performing team of data and infrastructure engineers building out Motional’s Data Stack
- Influence the technical roadmap, architectural priorities, and project scoping in alignment with broader engineering objectives
- Provide deep technical guidance, peer mentorship, and establish rigorous engineering standards and best practices for the team
- Define and execute the technical vision and architecture for storing metrics and generating ML datasets for large computer vision and behavioral models
- Identify, evaluate, and prototype cutting-edge technologies and methodologies for speeding up data loaders for training, ingestion of metrics, and querying of large datasets for everything from dashboards to training
- Act as a hands-on contributor for the most complex, high-impact architectural challenges within the data engine space
- Collaborate closely with ML research, ML Training platform, and data engineering teams to understand their requirements, co-design scalable architectures, and integrate solutions seamlessly
- Drive technical consensus and communicate complex architectural concepts and strategies to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
Skills
- BS or MS in Computer Science or related field
- 6+ years of professional experience in data platform engineering
- 3+ years of experience in a technical lead, staff engineer, or senior architecture role, with a proven track record of driving cross-team technical initiatives and mentoring senior engineers
- Extensive experience with managing large (petabyte plus) scale data platforms such as data warehouses, object storage, and ML training data stores
- Extensive experience with workflow orchestration frameworks such as Airflow or Step Functions
- Strong programming skills in Python
- Proven experience designing, building, and deploying agentic workflows and multi-agent systems using frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, DSPy, or custom LLM orchestration tools for reasoning and automated data processing
- Knowledge of modern data storage formats (Parquet, Iceberg) and vector databases (LanceDB, Milvus, Qdrant) and retrieval architectures (RAG) to manage massive multimodal datasets (video, sensor data, text)
- Strong knowledge of cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) solutions, distributed compute, and scalable model serving
- Prior experience building data warehouses, lakehouse architectures, or active-learning data loops at an advanced machine learning, robotics, or autonomous vehicle company
- We encourage a hybrid schedule with in-office time at one of our locations in Boston, Pittsburgh, or Las Vegas to support collaboration, or this role can be fully remote
- C++ experience is a plus
- Prior experience in autonomous vehicles (AV) is a plus
- Prior experience with Bazel based build systems
Benefits
- Hybrid schedule with in-office time at one of Motional’s locations in Boston, Pittsburgh, or Las Vegas, or fully remote
- Bonus or company equity may be included as additional compensation
- Medical insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- 401k with a company match
- Health savings accounts
- Life insurance
- Pet insurance
Company Overview