Motional

Motional

Principal Engineer Team Lead, AV Behavior

Las Vegas, Nevada, United States · Principal

Sponsorship not specified$200k-$275kDetected 22 days ago
PythonSQLData ScienceData VisualizationSystems EngineeringRoboticsLeadershipCommunicationCollaboration

About the role

  • Backed by Hyundai Motor Group, Motional is at the forefront of the physical AI revolution.
  • This team defines the standards for safe, comfortable, and assertive autonomous driving.
  • The team works closely with the autonomy teams on both target setting and validation.

Responsibilities

  • Design the System Behavior: Decompose ODD requirements into system and subsystem behaviors and interfaces to ensure vehicle capabilities meet product requirements.
  • Develop actionable policies and measurable targets: Convert legal and industry policy narratives to mathematical and/or specific requirements that the autonomy teams can implement.
  • Drive Evaluation Strategy: Advance our performance assessment framework by defining key metrics and reward functions.
  • Lead and Scale: Mentor and grow a high-performing engineering team. Foster a culture of technical excellence, scientific rigor, and data-driven decision-making.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Autonomy, Infrastructure, and the other Systems teams to drive design improvements. Ensure features generate a net positive effect on system safety, comfort, and assertiveness and meet our launch criteria
  • Data exploration: Leverage data science techniques and existing infrastructure to understand the problem space and engage with development teams to drive resolution in close collaboration with System Performance
  • Expert at leveraging large-scale simulation, track, and road data to extract actionable technical insights that drive resolution with development teams.
  • We work closely with stakeholders in autonomy, infrastructure, and operations to build the definitive safety case for the commercial launch of our fully driverless IONIQ 5 robotaxis in Las Vegas later this year.
  • We bridge the gap between systems engineering and real-world performance by decomposing the Operational Design Domain (ODD) into actionable competencies.
  • The team owns the behavior definition, actionable driving policies backed by tests, and acceptance criteria derived from standards and human benchmarks.

Requirements

  • Bachelor's degree and 7+ years of experience in Systems Engineering, Autonomous Systems, or Robotics, with deep expertise in one and working knowledge of the others.
  • Or Master's degree/PhD and 5+ years of experience
  • 3+ years of experience leading and scaling data-driven evaluation programs for autonomous driving or safety-critical emerging technologies.
  • A hands-on technical leader with a proven track record of growing small, high-performing teams.
  • Demonstrated track record in decomposing ODD requirements into vehicle capabilities, driving behavior logic, and defining measurable acceptance criteria.
  • Proficiency in Python, SQL, and data visualization techniques.
  • Master's degree in Systems Engineering, Autonomous Systems, or Robotics
  • Familiarity with SOTIF, ISO 26262, UL4600, AVSC Behavior competencies and other industry standards
  • Experience shaping product roadmaps
  • Experience establishing and leveraging industry benchmarks as well as human naturalistic driving behaviors to improve autonomous driving

Skills

  • Advance our performance assessment framework by defining key metrics and reward functions.

Compensation

  • $200,000 - $275,000 USD
  • Motional is a driverless technology company making autonomous vehicles a safe, reliable, and accessible reality. We're driven by something more.
  • Our journey is always people first.
  • We aren't just developing driverless cars
  • we're creating safer roadways, more equitable transportation options, and making our communities better places to live, work, and connect.
  • Our team is made up of engineers, researchers, innovators, dreamers and doers, who are creating a technology with the potential to transform the way we move.

Benefits

  • Familiarity with Reinforcement Learning (RL)
  • Incorporate Bleeding Edge technology: Leverage a combination of learning methods and metrics along with classical metrics to stretch the horizon of performance evaluation

Company info

  • Motional is a leading autonomous driving company on a mission to make driverless vehicles a safe, reliable, and accessible reality.
  • Motional isn't just building first-of-its-kind technology; we are transforming transportation to create safer streets and more sustainable mobility options.
  • What We're Looking For:
  • We are responsible for driving system design, for verifying and validating the autonomy stack, and for defining, measuring, and validating system performance targets.
  • We are looking for a passionate, self starting engineering leader to lead the AV Behavior Understanding and Evaluation team within the SRP organization.
  • We are seeking a hands-on Principal Engineer Team Lead to drive the design, evaluation, and scaling of these systems through data-driven design backed by structured and large scale assessment in simulation and on the road.

This listing is sourced directly from Motional's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.