Principal Engineer Team Lead, AV Behavior

About the role

Motional is seeking a Principal Engineer Team Lead to lead the AV Behavior Understanding and Evaluation team within the Systems Readiness and Performance organization. This team is crucial for defining standards for safe, comfortable, and assertive autonomous driving, and for driving the design, evaluation, and scaling of systems through data-driven design.

Responsibilities

• Design the System Behavior: Decompose ODD requirements into system and subsystem behaviors and interfaces to ensure vehicle capabilities meet product requirements.

• Characterize the performance target against parameters used to define AV capabilities to provide nuance in performance evaluation.

• Develop actionable policies and measurable targets: Convert legal and industry policy narratives to mathematical and/or specific requirements that the autonomy teams can implement. Leverage human benchmark and industry standards to establish measurable acceptance criteria for system readiness.

• Drive Evaluation Strategy: Advance our performance assessment framework by defining key metrics and reward functions. Derive Launch Criteria and Driving policy and strategically plan and execute testing campaigns leveraging advanced structured and large scale simulation, closed-course tracks, and on-road data.

• Lead and Scale: Mentor and grow a high-performing engineering team. Foster a culture of technical excellence, scientific rigor, and data-driven decision-making.

• 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.

• Incorporate Bleeding Edge technology: Leverage a combination of learning methods and metrics along with classical metrics to stretch the horizon of performance evaluation.

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.
• Expert at leveraging large-scale simulation, track, and road data to extract actionable technical insights that drive resolution with development teams.
• Proven track record of building consensus and driving alignment across multidisciplinary teams—spanning Autonomy, Infrastructure, and Operations—by leveraging technical influence over organizational authority.
• Strong foundation in statistical methodology, Data Science, and scientific rigor.
• Proficiency in Python, SQL, and data visualization techniques.
• Excellent communication skills; capable of articulating complex concepts to technical peers and executive leadership alike.
• Self-starter with a proactive mindset for driving ambiguous projects to completion.

Qualifications

• Ideal candidate also has:
• A 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.
• Experience with Reinforcement Learning (RL).
• Experience collaborating within agile environments and global, distributed teams.
• Experience with Industry standards and establishing human benchmarks.
• Specialized expertise in creating expansive datasets.
• Experience collaborating in an agile development environment.

Benefits

Motional offers a competitive salary range of $200,000 USD - $275,000 USD, 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 welcomes applications from all qualified individuals regardless of race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.