Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Data Mining

About Motional Motional is an autonomous vehicle technology company on a mission to make driverless vehicles a safe, reliable, and accessible reality. The company formed in 2020 and is majority-owned by Hyundai Motor Group, one of the world’s largest vehicle manufacturers. Motional has extensive experience in commercial robotaxi operations, with service currently available on the Uber network in Las Vegas and plans for driverless operations by the end of 2026. Headquartered in Boston, Motional has operations in the U.S. and Singapore. To explore our current openings, please visit our careers page at motional.com/careers. Please be alert for job recruitment scams, including fraudulent job postings, offers, and communications by individuals or entities purporting to be affiliated with Motional. All of our third party job postings link back to our motional.com/careers page. Need assistance? If you have questions or want to report suspicious activity, send us a direct message - we’re here to help.

Motional

We're making driverless vehicles a safe, reliable, and accessible reality.

autonomous vehiclesroboticsartificial intelligencemachine learningself-drivingride hailautonomyautomationsoftwareengineering

M

motional.com

501-1,000 employees

Software Development

Boston, Massachusetts

2020

Privately Held

79k LinkedIn followers

• At Motional, we're transforming how autonomous vehicles discover critical
• intelligence hidden within petabytes of multimodal sensor data. Our
• next-generation autonomous driving stack depends on finding the rare edge cases,
• long-tail scenarios, and model errors that matter most. Omnitag
• As a Principal Machine Learning Engineer, you will serve as a foundational
• technical leader shaping the long-term, multi-year vision for our foundation
• model post-training ecosystem. While training foundation models from scratch is
• on our horizon, your immediate mandate is to architect the systems that adapt,
• align, and optimize massive multimodal models for our autonomy stack.
• Armed with a strong sense of product, you will ensure our technical investments
• directly translate into downstream value, accelerating edge-case discovery,
• reducing engineering costs, and improving the final autonomous driving product.
• You will tackle highly complex, ambiguous problems, creating clarity and
• defining objectives that pay future dividends for the entire company. By
• championing deep cross-team collaboration, you will seamlessly connect ML
• capabilities with our Autonomy and Infrastructure organizations, breaking down
• silos to ensure smooth execution. Operating at the highest levels of technical
• maturity, you will solve the hardest technical challenges that few others can,
• setting the standard for state-of-the-art model distillation, advanced alignment
• techniques, automated agentic reasoning workflows, and the ultra-efficient
• deployment of billion-parameter models.
• Set the Technical Direction for Data Mining: Define the multi-year ML roadmap
• for our multimodal data-mining platform (Omnitag). Turn complex, ambiguous
• problems into clear objectives, balancing long-term foundational investments
• (e.g., agentic pipelines) with short-term tactical goals to drive maximum
• impact.
• Build the Data Flywheel: Own the full lifecycle of our ML data pipelines to
• close the active-learning loop. You will align massive multimodal teacher
• models and distill them into efficient student models for exabyte-scale
• search, accelerating model error diagnosis and reducing compute costs for
• automated curation.
• Architect Massive-Scale Systems & Tackle the Hardest Challenges: Design the
• architecture for applying billion-parameter models to real-world AV logs. As
• the lead implementer for our toughest technical bottlenecks, you will push
• the boundaries of parameter-efficient fine-tuning, optimize inference latency
• for large-scale retrieval, and build RL-driven reasoning systems—all while
• proactively managing system reliability and cloud footprint.
• Champion Cross-Functional Initiatives: Act as the technical bridge between
• Data Mining, Autonomy, and Infrastructure. Armed with a strong product sense,
• you will deeply understand the edge cases the autonomy stack needs to solve
• next and coordinate phased rollouts to seamlessly integrate new discovery
• capabilities into the core AV development loop.
• Lead and Grow a High-Performing Pod: Serve as a hands-on player-coach,
• directly guiding up to 3 engineers. Delegate ownership, coach your team to
• deliver state-of-the-art implementations, and advocate for tooling and
• practices that elevate developer productivity and reinforce Motional's
• culture of engineering excellence.

Required

• BS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field, or equivalent
• professional experience.
• 12+ years of hands-on machine learning engineering experience, with a proven
• track record of owning the end-to-end development cycle of enterprise-scale
• ML systems, from experiment design through infrastructure, testing, rollout,
• monitoring, and iteration.
• Exceptional technical maturity, with a track record of building and shipping
• impact that is innovative, broad in reach (affecting many teams or orgs), and
• pays future dividends for the company.
• Proven ability to solve technical problems that few others can, the person
• others seek out for complex ML infrastructure, deep learning architectures,
• and production optimization.
• Deep experience training large-scale models from the ground up, including
• distributed training across multi-node GPU clusters, data pipeline and
• curation strategy, scaling and evaluation methodology, and the practical
• debugging of large training runs.
• Demonstrated ownership of a technical roadmap for a team or problem area,
• including balancing competing objectives (impact, quality, engineering time,
• compute cost) and making deliberate tradeoffs between long-term foundational
• investment and short-term tactical goals.
• Ability to create clarity from ambiguous, complex problems, decomposing them
• concisely, defining objectives, and establishing measures of progress for
• yourself and your team.
• Deep, generalist ML expertise spanning massive-scale model training,
• hardware-optimized deployment, and production ML orchestration in cloud
• environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Experience leading cross-team initiatives, including coordinating phased
• rollouts and migrations across dependent teams, and mentoring engineers to
• raise the bar around you.
• Strong oral and written communication skills. You can clearly explain complex
• technical problems using data and analysis, and communicate proposals in a
• way that earns buy-in and creates alignment.

Preferred

• MS/PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field.
• Experience as a Tech Lead Manager (TLM) or in direct people management,
• coaching and growing small teams of 2–3 engineers.
• Background in autonomous driving, robotics, or complex real-time
• decision-making systems.
• Experience with massive-scale ML data mining, multimodal foundation models,
• and embodied AI.
• Hands-on experience pretraining or post-training a foundation model, data
• curation at scale, pretraining or continued-pretraining recipes, SFT/RLHF or
• other alignment methods, and evaluation harness design.
• Experience with model compression and adaptation at scale, knowledge
• distillation (teacher/student), parameter-efficient fine-tuning, or
• quantization for high-throughput inference.
• Experience with large-scale retrieval or search systems, or RL for reasoning
• and decision-making.
• Deep knowledge of enterprise model serving (TF Serving, Triton, TorchServe)
• and modern MLOps platforms.
• Experience building agentic pipelines or LLM-driven reasoning and tool-use
• workflows.
• A strong portfolio of publications, patents, or significant open-source
• contributions that demonstrates influence on the broader engineering
• community.
• 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.

• 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
• [https://www.linkedin.com/company/67123512/], Instagram
• [https://www.instagram.com/motionaldrive/] 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