Motional

Director, Prediction and ML Planning

Remote U.S · Director

Sponsorship not specified$288k-$396kDetected 28 days ago

Machine LearningData EngineeringLLMsForecastingSystems EngineeringRoboticsElectrical EngineeringResearchLeadershipCollaboration

About the role

In this role, you will sit at the intersection of intent forecasting and ego-vehicle decision-making.
Core Responsibilities: - Strategic Leadership: Oversee and unify the machine learning-based Prediction and Motion Planning teams.
Advanced expertise in Imitation Learning and Reinforcement Learning for decision-making.

Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Perception, Infrastructure and Systems Engineering to ensure the Large Driving Model seamlessly integrates onto the vehicle platform and meets rigorous safety and real-time performance standards.
Unified Architectures: Proven experience guiding teams toward building integrated models (e.g., trajectory forecasting joint with ego-policy generation) rather than decoupled, sequential pipelines.
As a senior leader in the Autonomy organization, you will not only drive technical breakthroughs but will also scale and nurture a world-class AI organization in a sustainable, inclusive, and highly collaborative fashion.
Implement sustainable engineering practices that prevent burnout, promote psychological safety, and ensure high technical velocity.

5+ years of experience managing high-performing engineering teams, with at least 3+ years of experience managing multiple sub-teams within an autonomous systems, robotics, or advanced AI organization.
Strong understanding of the full lifecycle from research to vehicle deployment.
Proven Leadership: 5+ years of experience managing high-performing engineering teams, with at least 3+ years of experience managing multiple sub-teams within an autonomous systems, robotics, or advanced AI organization.

A strong footprint in the AI/robotics research community (CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICRA, IROS publications), with a willingness to publish future work.
Experience building large-scale data pipelines and training infrastructure required to train large driving models.
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'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.
Higher purpose, greater impact.

$288,000 - $396,000 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.

Stay at the absolute frontier of AI research and define the technical roadmap for developing state-of-the-art imitation learning (IL) and reinforcement learning (RL) approaches to advance end-to-end learnt planning.
Strong familiarity with multimodal foundational AI models, specifically Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs).
Strategic Leadership: Oversee and unify the machine learning-based Prediction and Motion Planning teams.
Organizational Growth: Lead, mentor, and scale multiple sub-teams of machine learning engineers and researchers.
ML Behavior Expertise: Deep theoretical and practical proficiency in machine learning applied to robotics behaviors.
Educational Background: M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related quantitative field with a heavy focus on Machine Learning.
Motional is seeking a visionary, technically deep Director of Behaviors to lead our machine learning-based Prediction and Planning teams.

Motional is a public transit and autonomous vehicle pioneer, developing Level 4 driverless vehicles that are changing the way the world moves.
At the heart of our mission is the Autonomy organization, where we solve some of the most complex engineering and artificial intelligence challenges of our generation.

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