Principal Engineer Tech Lead, Embodied AI & Off-Board Performance Evaluation

Mission Summary: Motional is a leading autonomous driving company on a mission to make driverless vehicles a safe, reliable, and accessible reality. Backed by Hyundai Motor Group, Motional is at the forefront of the physical AI revolution. Motional isn’t just building first-of-its-kind technology; we are transforming transportation to create safer streets and more sustainable mobility options. The Systems Readiness and Performance team is the crucial bridge between software development and real-world deployment. We are responsible for driving system design, for verifying and validating the autonomy stack, and for defining, measuring, and validating system performance targets. We work closely with stakeholders in autonomy, infrastructure, and operations to build the definitive safety case for the commercial launch of our fully driverless IONIQ 5 robotaxis in Las Vegas later this year. We are seeking a talented Principal Engineer to technically oversee the design, development, and deployment of a novel Embodied AI and Large Language Model (LLM)-based monitoring framework for off-board scenario understanding, intelligence evaluation, and root cause analysis. While this role will pioneer future off-board Vision-Language-Action (VLA) integrations for off-board analysis, it requires strong foundations as an Autonomous Vehicle Performance Metrics developer. You will lead the creation of a specialized, off-board evaluation layer that consumes AV drive logs and fleet data to automatically infer scenario safety and assess driving intelligence without running live on the vehicle. Your architectural designs will integrate with internal systems to form a complete pipeline that identifies safety incidents, enriches them with structured context, and conducts detailed root cause analysis to provide the Autonomy team with actionable direction. If you are an innovative individual contributor with a passion for overseeing the integration of complex, scalable data pipelines and state-of-the-art Embodied AI frameworks, we encourage you to apply. What You'll Be Doing: Embodied AI & LLM Framework Oversight: Technically oversee the architecture to identify, describe, and enrich events in historical vehicle logs using Multimodal LLMs. Multi-Modal Data Fusion: Oversee the off-board ingestion and fusion of semantic scene descriptions, ego-centric kinematics, and internal autonomy telemetry to create a holistic diagnostic context for LLM inference. Prompt Engineering & Model Integration: Develop structured prompting templates utilizing Contextual Prompting (CP), Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and In-Context Learning (ICL) to evaluate scenarios. AI Inference & Evaluation Scalability: Architect the integration of foundation models into the Metrics Engine (ME), designing efficient cascade filtering and log slice parallelization strategies to scale high-volume LLM inference across simulation and on-road drive logs while managing computational latency and costs. AV Performance Metrics Foundations: Define, design, and implement key metrics to evaluate autonomous vehicle performance, such as lane change capability, oscillations, and braking. Driving Policy Integration: Deploy and manage a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) vector database containing codified AV Driving Policies to ground off-board LLM evaluations in specific Operational Design Domains. Cross-Functional Technical Leadership: Serve as a technical escalation point and collaborate with Autonomy (Planner, Prediction, Perception) and Systems teams to deliver high-signal, enriched events. Advanced Physical AI R&D: Drive the transition toward Direct Vector-LLM Fusion utilizing emerging Physical AI ecosystems and open-weights Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to process telemetry off-board without text-translation bottlenecks. What We're Looking For: 10+ years of professional experience in software engineering, applied AI/ML, or autonomous vehicle systems development. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Robotics, or a related field. Proven experience working with Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for reasoning, parsing, and scene description. Experience with parameter-efficient fine-tuning and deploying open-weights models on internal infrastructure. Familiarity with local and cloud vector databases, such as LanceDB, for housing output vector embeddings. Experience with adversarial scenario generation and closed-loop simulation environments. Strong background leveraging software to develop frameworks, libraries, and tools for calculating and aggregating AV performance metrics. Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, particularly in the context of complex system performance evaluation. Expert-level proficiency in Python and strong understanding of software development principles. Bonus Points (not required): Experience working with autonomous vehicle sensor data, including its processing and integration. Hands-on experience with data pipeline orchestration tools and distributed data processing frameworks. Expertise managing cloud infrastructure on AWS or GCP for processing terabytes of data efficiently. Familiarity with Ray and Ray clusters for scaling Python applications and AI/ML tasks. Expertise with C++ programming for data frameworks. Success Metrics: Successful deployment of an automated off-board evaluator capable of inferring scenario safety and assessing AV intelligence with a target >90% F1 score for anomaly detection. Successful delivery of high-signal, LLM-enriched events and robust performance metrics that enable Autonomy teams to efficiently diagnose and resolve complex, long-tail behavioral issues. Reduction of the turnaround time required to move from fleet data collection to actionable simulation scenario creation from days to hours. Improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of AV performance evaluation processes. This is a unique opportunity to make a meaningful impact at Motional by enhancing our data platform and accelerating development speed for our industry-leading autonomous vehicle metrics and capabilities ecosystem. We take pride in having some of the brightest and most dedicated talent in the world on our team. If you're innovative, driven, and eager to tackle challenges, we'd love to have you join us! Physical Demands: While performing the duties of this job, the employee is frequently required to sit, talk, or hear. The employee is occasionally required to stand and at times for long periods; walk; use hands to finger, handle, or feel; reach with hands and arms. The employee must occasionally lift and move up to 50 pounds. Travel Requirements (greater than 20%): Expected to travel for 1-2 weeks each quarter visiting all of our testing sites - mostly to LV, but also domestically as needed for the business. Working Environment: The work environment characteristics described here represent those a team member encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. The team member is regularly exposed to mechanical and computer parts. The team member is occasionally exposed to fumes and/or airborne particlesThe noise level in the environment is low to moderate. 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.