Motional is seeking a Principal Engineer to serve as the technical North Star for our Platform & Applications group. This is a high-impact leadership role responsible for the architecture and engineering excellence of the systems that power our autonomous vehicle (AV) fleet and the developers who build it.
You will oversee the technical direction for two critical domains: Developer Platform and Cloud Apps. As Motional transitions to commercial driverless operations, you will lead the engineering efforts to ensure our systems meet the highest standards of reliability and scalability for a global fleet.
What you'll be doing:
- Design and build complex software systems that interface with internal enterprise tools and external commercial partners.
- Establish and enforce global software engineering standards across the group, promoting industry best practices in code quality, security, and maintainability.
- Lead the evolution of our microservice-based architecture, setting clear boundaries between Cloud, AV, and third-party systems to support a fleet scaling toward 300+ commercial vehicles.
- Architect and launch our Internal Developer Portal, a pluggable platform designed to centralize resources, documentation, and engineering productivity metrics.
- Deep dive into our Bazel build systems and GitLab CI/CD pipelines to reduce developer friction, optimize build caches, and accelerate the development lifecycle.
What we're looking for:
- Minimum Bachelor's in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).
- 12+ years of progressive experience in Software Engineering, with at least 5 years in a Principal, Staff, or Architect role where you successfully defined technical strategy across multiple teams.
- Proven ability to establish and enforce unified technical standards, code quality benchmarks, and best practices that govern an entire department.
- A Ship-to-Production mindset with experience delivering mission-critical systems in high-growth environments.
- Mastery of Bazel (or similar large-scale build systems). You should understand how to optimize build graphs, manage remote caching, and ensure hermetic, reproducible builds for a massive monorepo.
- Deep experience with GitLab CI or GitHub Actions at an enterprise scale, including the development of custom bots and automation to manage complex PR/MR lifecycles.
- Expertise in architecting secure, scalable microservices on AWS (EKS) that bridge internal systems, vehicle platforms, and external partner APIs (e.g., ride-hailing or fleet management).
- Advanced proficiency in one or more of the following languages, Go, Python, C++ or Node.js, with the ability to dive into both backend service logic and frontend portal architecture.
- Demonstrated ability to collaborate across diverse engineering functions, from low-level infrastructure teams to high-level application developers.
- Ability to translate high-level business goals into multi-year technical roadmaps.
- Exceptional ability to articulate and defend complex architectural decisions to both deep-stack engineers and executive leadership.
Bonus points (not required):
- Prior experience in the Autonomous Vehicle, Robotics, or large-scale IoT/Fleet Management industries.
- Experience with MLOps and integrating ML training workflows into standard CI/CD.
- Hands-on experience with agentic software development and the Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- Strong foundation in SRE principles, Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform/CloudFormation), and observability stacks (e.g., VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, Datadog).
- Proven expertise in defining and implementing DORA or other engineering performance metrics frameworks.
