Principal Software Engineer - AI Data Engine

Mission Summary:

We are seeking an experienced and visionary Staff Engineer to technically anchor our new AI Data Engine team. This pivotal role will drive the technical strategy, architecture, and execution of initiatives aimed at significantly accelerating our ML dataset generation and our data warehouse stack. The ultimate goal is to drastically reduce the development cycle for new pipelines, ML models and get us operationally prepared for a driverless future!

You will be a hands-on technical leader, blending deep expertise in data systems and infrastructure with the ability to architect complex, highly scalable solutions. While this is an individual contributor role, you will act as a force multiplier-mentoring a high-performing team of engineers, setting rigorous technical standards, and fostering a culture of engineering excellence, innovation, and continuous improvement.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Technical Leadership & Mentorship:
• Serve as the technical anchor for a high-performing team of data and infrastructure engineers building out Motional’s Data Stack.
• Influence the technical roadmap, architectural priorities, and project scoping in alignment with broader engineering objectives.
• Provide deep technical guidance, peer mentorship, and establish rigorous engineering standards and best practices for the team.
• Architecture, Strategy & Execution:
• Define and execute the technical vision and architecture for storing metrics and generating ML datasets for large computer vision and behavioral models.
• Identify, evaluate, and prototype cutting-edge technologies and methodologies for speeding up data loaders for training, ingestion of metrics, and querying of large datasets for everything from dashboards to training.
• Act as a hands-on contributor for the most complex, high-impact architectural challenges within the data engine space.
• Cross-functional Collaboration:
• Collaborate closely with ML research, ML Training platform, and data engineering teams to understand their requirements, co-design scalable architectures, and integrate solutions seamlessly.
• Drive technical consensus and communicate complex architectural concepts and strategies to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

What We're Looking For:

• Experience:
• BS or MS in Computer Science or related field
• 6+ years of professional experience in data platform engineering
• 3+ years of experience in a technical lead, staff engineer, or senior architecture role, with a proven track record of driving cross-team technical initiatives and mentoring senior engineers.
• Extensive experience with managing large (petabyte plus) scale data platforms such as data warehouses, object storage, and ML training data stores. 
• Extensive experience with workflow orchestration frameworks such as Airflow or Step Functions.
• Technical Skills:
• Core Programming: Strong programming skills in Python. C++ experience is a plus.
• Agentic AI & LLMOps: Proven experience designing, building, and deploying agentic workflows and multi-agent systems using frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, DSPy, or custom LLM orchestration tools for reasoning and automated data processing.
• Storage & Vector Ecosystems: Knowledge of modern data storage formats (Parquet, Iceberg) and vector databases (LanceDB, Milvus, Qdrant) and retrieval architectures (RAG) to manage massive multimodal datasets (video, sensor data, text).
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Strong knowledge of cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) solutions, distributed compute, and scalable model serving.
• Domain Experience: Prior experience building data warehouses, lakehouse architectures, or active-learning data loops at an advanced machine learning, robotics, or autonomous vehicle company.

Bonus Points (not required): 

• Prior experience in autonomous vehicles (AV) is a plus.
• Prior experience with Bazel based build systems.

We encourage a hybrid schedule with in-office time at one of our locations in Boston, Pittsburgh, or Las Vegas to support collaboration, or this role can be fully remote.

The salary range for this role is an estimate based on a wide range of compensation factors including but not limited to specific skills, experience and expertise, role location, certifications, licenses, and business needs. The estimated compensation range listed in this job posting reflects base salary only. This role may include additional forms of compensation such as a bonus or company equity. 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’s benefits include but are not limited to medical, dental, vision, 401k with a company match, health saving accounts, life insurance, pet insurance, and more.

Salary Range

$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.

Higher purpose, greater impact.

We’re creating first-of-its-kind technology that will transform transportation. To do so successfully, we must design for everyone in our cities and on our roads. We believe in building a great place to work through a progressive, global culture that is diverse, inclusive, and ensures people feel valued at every level of the organization. Diversity helps us to see the world differently; it’s not only good for our business, it’s the right thing to do.  

Scale up, not starting up.

Our team is behind some of the industry's largest leaps forward, including the first fully-autonomous cross-country drive in the U.S, the launch of the world's first robotaxi pilot, and operation of the world's longest-standing public robotaxi fleet. We’re driven to scale; we’re moving towards commercialization of our technology, and we need team members who are ready to embrace change and challenges.

Formed as a joint venture between Hyundai Motor Group and Aptiv, Motional is fundamentally changing how people move through their lives. Headquartered in Boston, Motional has operations in the U.S and Asia. For more information, visit  www.Motional.com and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube.

Motional AD Inc. is an EOE. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. To comply with Federal Law, we participate in E-Verify. All newly-hired employees are queried through this electronic system established by the DHS and the SSA to verify their identity and employment eligibility.