What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Principal Architect, ML Infrastructure position at Motional?
We're seeking a Senior Principal Engineer, Machine Learning Infrastructure to lead the technical vision and architecture for the systems that power our entire machine learning lifecycle—from training data set generation to model training, evaluation, and deployment. This is a mission-critical leadership role within the ML Infra team, shaping the infrastructure that supports terabytes of daily sensor data and petabyte-scale datasets essential for autonomous vehicle development.
This role is ideal for a senior technologist with a deep background in ML systems and data architecture, who thrives on building for scale, performance, and engineering excellence.
What You'll Do
- Own the architecture of Motional's ML infrastructure, enabling scalable storage, curation, and access for 100 engineers and researchers across autonomy teams.
- Design and evolve infrastructure to support petabyte-scale machine learning workflows, including multimodal perception data, synthetic data, simulation output, and continuous training pipelines.
- Architect high-throughput systems for distributed training on large GPU clusters, driving significant improvements in utilization, throughput, and job efficiency.
- Establish robust data governance, observability, and retention strategies to ensure compliance, reproducibility, and long-term data utility.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with ML engineers, autonomy researchers, data engineers, and DevOps to ensure tight integration between infrastructure and user workflows.
- Lead technical strategy and roadmap development for the ML Infra team, incorporating cutting-edge tools and best practices from industry and open source.
- Mentor and influence engineers across teams, promoting engineering excellence in distributed systems, ML platforms, and autonomy-scale data management.
What We're Looking For
- 15 years of meaningful software engineering experience, including significant architecture-level ownership in ML infrastructure.
- Proven experience leading the design of ML platforms that serve large-scale training and inference workloads.
- Deep technical fluency in distributed storage, high-volume data pipelines, and data compression strategies for ML use cases.
- Strong knowledge of Linux systems, Python, and C or similar performance-oriented languages.
- Experience operating in hybrid environments: bare metal, HPC, and public cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure).
- Comfortable owning cross-org initiatives and influencing system-level design across autonomy, simulation, and platform teams.
- Prior work in robotics, autonomous vehicles, or safety-critical domains strongly preferred.
Bonus Points
- Experience building or leading infrastructure at a top-tier ML/AI company or AV program.
- Background contributing to open-source ML infrastructure projects.
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.
Salary : $202,000 - $290,000