Principal Engineer Tech Lead, Embodied AI & Off-Board Performance Evaluation
MotionalBoston, MA · Remote · full time · Principal
$200,000 – $275,000
Listed on Motional’s own careers site. You apply with them directly — we never stand between you and the employer.
What this role is
This Principal Engineer role oversees the development of an off-board AI evaluation framework that uses large language models and multimodal data to automatically assess autonomous vehicle safety, performance, and driving intelligence from historical logs. The position suits experienced software engineers or AI/ML specialists with deep knowledge of autonomous vehicles who want to bridge data science and real-world vehicle deployment at an established, well-funded company.
Our summary, not Motional’s wording. The full posting is on their site.
Skills this role names
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What they ask for
Required
- 10+ years in software engineering, applied AI/ML, or autonomous vehicle systems
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Robotics, or related field
- Proven experience with Large Language Models and Vision-Language Models for reasoning and scene description
- Experience with parameter-efficient fine-tuning and deploying open-weights models
- Familiarity with local and cloud vector databases like LanceDB
- Experience with adversarial scenario generation and closed-loop simulation
- Background developing frameworks and tools for AV performance metrics
- Expert-level Python proficiency
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills in complex system performance evaluation
Nice to have
- Experience with autonomous vehicle sensor data processing and integration
- Hands-on experience with data pipeline orchestration tools
- Expertise managing cloud infrastructure on AWS or GCP for large-scale data processing
- Familiarity with Ray and Ray clusters for scaling Python applications
- C++ programming expertise for data frameworks