Principal Engineer Team Lead – Autonomous Vehicle Safety

motional; United States; Remote; USD 200,000 - 275,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

401k with company match

Health savings accounts

Life insurance

Pet insurance

Job summary

Motional in the United States seeks a senior technical leader to bridge software and real-world deployment within the Safety & Targets organization. You will lead the Safety & Targets team, defining quantitative targets, and producing the safety case for driverless robotaxi services.

This role blends hands-on work with people leadership in a safety-critical environment. You will mentor engineers, own safety-critical development, and drive cross-functional decisions with autonomy, operations, and

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree with 7+ years, or Master's or PhD with 5+ years in systems engineering, functional safety, autonomous systems, or robotics.
• 3+ years leading safety-critical development, validation, or safety assurance programs for autonomous driving or other safety-critical tech.
• Hands-on technical leader with a proven track record of growing small, high-performing teams and data-driven engineering culture.

Responsibilities

• Lead development and maturation of collision detection, response, and imminent collision handling across autonomy and operations.
• Own the benchmark program spanning safety, comfort, and assertiveness using naturalistic data and crash statistics.
• Define what sufficient validation coverage looks like and drive cross-functional closure of gaps.
• Deliver systems engineering artifacts including hazard analysis, STPA, HAZOP, FMEA, requirements, and safety-case arguments.
• Productionize crash data analysis, event ingestion, labeling, and automated monitoring for fleet-scale safety insights.
• Mentor and grow a high-performing safety engineering team and collaborate with autonomy, infrastructure, operations, and legal.

Skills

Systems engineering

Functional safety

Autonomous systems

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

Tools

HAZOP/STPA tools

Job description

Motional in the United States seeks a senior technical leader to bridge software and real-world deployment within the Safety & Targets organization. You will lead the Safety & Targets team, defining quantitative targets, and producing the safety case for driverless robotaxi services.

This role blends hands-on work with people leadership in a safety-critical environment. You will mentor engineers, own safety-critical development, and drive cross-functional decisions with autonomy, operations, and