Motional is seeking a Senior Principal Engineer, Machine Learning Infrastructure to lead the technical vision and architecture for the systems that power their entire machine learning lifecycle, supporting terabytes of daily sensor data and petabyte-scale datasets essential for autonomous vehicle development.
Requirements
- 15+ years of meaningful software engineering experience, including significant architecture-level ownership in ML infrastructure.
- Proven experience leading the design of ML platforms that serve large-scale training and inference workloads.
- Deep technical fluency in distributed storage, high-volume data pipelines, and data compression strategies for ML use cases.
- Strong knowledge of Linux systems, Python, and C++ or similar performance-oriented languages.
- Experience operating in hybrid environments: bare metal, HPC, and public cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure).
- Experience building or leading infrastructure at a top-tier ML/AI company or AV program.
- Background contributing to open-source ML infrastructure projects.
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture of Motional’s ML infrastructure, enabling scalable storage, curation, and access for 100+ engineers and researchers across autonomy teams.
- Design and evolve infrastructure to support petabyte-scale machine learning workflows, including multimodal perception data, synthetic data, simulation output, and continuous training pipelines.
- Architect high-throughput systems for distributed training on large GPU clusters, driving significant improvements in utilization, throughput, and job efficiency.
- Establish robust data governance, observability, and retention strategies to ensure compliance, reproducibility, and long-term data utility.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with ML engineers, autonomy researchers, data engineers, and DevOps to ensure tight integration between infrastructure and user workflows.
- Lead technical strategy and roadmap development for the ML Infra team, incorporating cutting-edge tools and best practices from industry and open source.
- Mentor and influence engineers across teams, promoting engineering excellence in distributed systems, ML platforms, and autonomy-scale data management.
Other
- Comfortable owning cross-org initiatives and influencing system-level design across autonomy, simulation, and platform teams.
- Prior work in robotics, autonomous vehicles, or safety-critical domains strongly preferred.
- The recruiter assigned to this role can share more information about the specific compensation and benefit details associated with this role during the hiring process.
- Candidates for certain positions are eligible to participate in Motional’s benefits program.
- Motional AD Inc. is an EOE. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
