[Remote] Principal Engineer Team Lead, Simulation Infrastructure

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Motional is hiring a Principal Engineer Team Lead to lead its Simulation Infrastructure team within Testing Services. The role is responsible for designing, scaling, and optimizing the cloud and software infrastructure behind its Software-in-the-Loop simulation framework and offboard validation pipeline, while leading engineers and integrating simulation into software release gating.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of simulation infrastructure engineers across multiple locations
• Define and execute the multi-year technical roadmap for Simulation Infrastructure, aligning team goals with broader Autonomy and Testing Services objectives
• Partner cross-functionally with Release, SIL Runtime, Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL), and Autonomy development teams to expand test coverage and streamline offboard validation
• Architect and maintain high-throughput, multi-cluster (with blue/green CI deployments), cloud load balancing, resim/orchestration pipelines, and job prioritization for cloud simulation
• Oversee EC2 sizing and spot queue enablement with automated failover to optimize AWS Cloud expenditures while maximizing compute throughput and queue observability
• Develop extensible, plug-and-play simulation engine abstractions and interfaces to support modular simulation architectures
• Ensure ecosystem compatibility and seamless integration across internal tools and frameworks
• Build and maintain System Under Test (SUT) definitions along with tooling to support SUT workflows across different simulation modalities
• Develop infrastructure supporting both local and remote/cloud execution and scaling, including map and scenario infrastructure plumbing
• Support and maintain data generation pipelines, synthetic data workflows, and automated log-to-synthetic pipelines
• Establish comprehensive cost, throughput, and queue observability, building real-time metrics dashboards for simulation execution, cluster health, and cloud resource efficiency
• Lead postmortems, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement initiatives for simulation test stability and infrastructure reliability

Skills

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Robotics, Mechatronics, or a closely related engineering field
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience (or 5+ years with a Master's degree) in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or complex cloud infrastructure
• 4+ years of experience leading engineering teams, defining technical roadmaps, and mentoring junior/senior engineers
• Strong production-level engineering skills in Python and C++ in Linux environments
• Deep experience with AWS Cloud scaling, EC2 configuration, spot instances, cluster load balancing, and cloud cost management
• Hands-on experience with GitLab CI/CD pipeline design, Docker containerization, and automated deployment architectures
• Proficiency interfacing with databases (SQL, Postgres, Trino) and building observability dashboards (Grafana, Looker)
• Experience with autonomous driving simulation platforms (e.g., log sim, synthetic simulation, open and closed loop simulation, Neural Generation, World Foundation Models, OpenScenario/OSC2, YAML scenarios)
• Experience with workflow orchestration engines (e.g., Apache Airflow)
• Familiarity with Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) bench integration, vehicle CAN protocols, or sensor simulation (Camera, LiDAR)
• Experience with Physics Based Vehicle Dynamics Modeling and industry standard tools

Benefits

• Candidates for certain positions are eligible to participate in Motional’s benefits program.
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits (for eligible positions)
• 401k with a company match (for eligible positions)
• Health saving accounts (for eligible positions)
• Life insurance (for eligible positions)
• Pet insurance (for eligible positions)

Company Overview

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