Principal Engineer, Data & ML Infrastructure

About the role

The Mission Summary outlines the need for a Principal Engineer, Technical Lead to lead the Ground Truth Regression team at Motional. This team is crucial for validating changes to perception in autonomous vehicles, ensuring safety and reliability.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of engineers with a diverse skill set to deliver critical software and infrastructure supporting the development of autonomous vehicle ML models and software.
• Drive innovation by researching and developing new large scale data warehousing and analysis.
• Own large-scale data analysis workflows that surface unexpected impacts of planned and unplanned changes to the ML models and software.
• Work with annotation specialists to build high-quality evaluation datasets.
• Provide statistical depth on model performance & generalization through rigorous error and change analysis.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to the team, fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement.
• Manage project timelines, resources, and deliverables to ensure successful project execution.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related field.
• Excellent leadership, communication, and problem-solving skills.
• Proven record leading a small diverse dedicated team supporting a large user base.
• Experience in machine learning, data mining, and statistical analysis.
• Proficiency in Go (Golang), Python, or C++ for building high-performance, concurrent microservices and platform tooling.
• Deep hands-on experience building production infrastructure on public clouds (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and managing containerized workloads at scale using Kubernetes (K8s).
• Experience with large-scale data processing and distributed computing technologies.

Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related field is a plus.
• Knowledge of or hands-on experience with OLAP databases (e.g., ClickHouse) for data analysis is a plus.
• Experience with machine learning in the autonomous driving domain is a plus.
• Familiarity with error analysis and statistical techniques for monitoring model performance and generalization in production is a plus.
• Publishations or contributions to the AI/ML community are a plus.

Skills

• Strong background in cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, and technical leadership.
• Experience in developing and deploying advanced data analysis and large scale orchestration frameworks.
• Experience in developing the full stack – AWS Kubernetes orchestration framework, ReSimulation, model metrics, regression reports, and deep dive analysis UI’s.
• Experience working with annotation specialists to build high-quality evaluation datasets.
• Experience providing statistical depth on model performance & generalization through rigorous error and change analysis.
• Experience providing technical leadership and mentorship to the team, fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement.
• Experience managing project timelines, resources, and deliverables to ensure successful project execution.

Benefits

Motional offers a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401k with a company match, health savings accounts, life insurance, pet insurance, and more. Motional is an Equal Opportunity Employer and is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace.

Pay

The estimated compensation range for this role is $200,000 USD - $275,000 USD. Additional forms of compensation such as bonuses or company equity may be offered.

Schedule

Motional operates on a standard full-time schedule.