Lead Principal Engineer, Behavior Safety & Metrics

Motional; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 240,000 - 330,000; Full time

Job summary

Motional is hiring a Principal Engineer Team Lead, Behavior Safety & Metrics in Boston. You will lead evaluation efforts across Prediction and Planning, defining how we measure and improve autonomous driving behavior, and drive data-driven improvements for safety, comfort, and performance.

You will collaborate with ML engineers, safety teams, and cross-functional partners to develop advanced evaluation methodologies, develop robust metrics, and build scalable data pipelines to support production

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree and 7+ years of experience in Computer Science, Systems Engineering, Robotics, or a related technical field (or Master’s/PhD and 5+ years).
• Strong foundation in probability/statistics, data science, and scientific rigor applied to multi-agent systems.
• Proficiency in Python, SQL, and data analysis (visualization, statistics) in production environments.

Responsibilities

• Act as the central authority on evaluation for the Behaviors teams, bridging model development and system-level autonomous behavior.
• Drive the evaluation strategy for prediction and planning models, including open-loop and simulation-based assessments.
• Design and implement advanced metrics to measure model impact on overall system behavior, leveraging ML-based approaches for robust evaluation.
• Incorporate counterfactual reasoning and reaction time analysis into evaluation frameworks.
• Develop data mining strategy and assess coverage of training and evaluation datasets.
• Build tooling and pipelines; identify gaps and collaborate with ML engineers and roboticists to solve open-ended problems.
• Cross-functional collaboration with Safety, Infrastructure, Operations, Legal, and other Systems teams to drive design improvements.

Skills

Evaluation strategy

Python

SQL

Data analysis

Statistics

Cross-functional collaboration

Model evaluation

Hazard analysis familiarity

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Systems Engineering, Robotics, or related field

Job description

Motional is hiring a Principal Engineer Team Lead, Behavior Safety & Metrics in Boston. You will lead evaluation efforts across Prediction and Planning, defining how we measure and improve autonomous driving behavior, and drive data-driven improvements for safety, comfort, and performance.

You will collaborate with ML engineers, safety teams, and cross-functional partners to develop advanced evaluation methodologies, develop robust metrics, and build scalable data pipelines to support production