Principal Engineer Team Lead, Simulation Infrastructure

motional; United States; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Job summary

Motional, backed by Hyundai Motor Group, seeks a Principal Engineer Team Lead to guide the Simulation Infrastructure within the Testing Services organization. You will design, scale, and optimize the cloud-based SIL and offboard validation pipelines powering millions of simulation runs monthly.

You will lead a distributed team, define a multi-year technical roadmap, and collaborate with Release, SIL Runtime, HIL, and Autonomy teams to expand test coverage and ensure safe software releases across

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master’s degree in CS/Engineering or closely related field.
• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience in autonomous driving, robotics, or cloud infra.
• 4+ years of engineering team leadership, defining roadmaps, mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a distributed team of simulation infrastructure engineers across multiple locations.
• Define and execute a multi-year technical roadmap for Simulation Infrastructure aligning with Autonomy and Testing Services.
• Collaborate with Release, SIL Runtime, HIL, and Autonomy teams to expand test coverage and streamline offboard validation.
• Architect high-throughput cloud pipelines, multi-cluster deployments, and observability dashboards for simulation workloads.

Skills

Python

C++

Team leadership

Linux

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science/Engineering

Tools

AWS

EC2

Docker

GitLab CI/CD

PostgreSQL

Grafana/Looker

Apache Airflow

Job description

Mission Summary:

Motional is at the forefront of the driverless revolution. An autonomous driving company backed by Hyundai Motor Group, we are making autonomous vehicles a safe, reliable, and accessible reality.

We are seeking a Principal Engineer Team Lead to join and lead our Simulation Infrastructure team within the Testing Services organization. In this role, you will be the technical and team leader responsible for designing, building, scaling, and optimizing the cloud and software infrastructure that powers our Software-in-the-Loop (SIL) simulation framework and offboard validation pipeline.

You will lead a high-performing team of engineers responsible for processing millions of simulation runs per month, optimizing cloud compute resources, building robust scenario library infrastructure, and integrating simulation capabilities directly into Motional's software release gating lifecycle. Your work will directly accelerate autonomy development, improve build health, and ensure safe software releases across our robotaxi fleet.

Team Leadership & Strategy

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of simulation infrastructure engineers across multiple locations.
• Define and execute the multi-year technical roadmap for Simulation Infrastructure, aligning team goals with broader Autonomy and Testing Services objectives.
• Partner cross-functionally with Release, SIL Runtime, Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL), and Autonomy development teams to expand test coverage and streamline offboard validation.

Cloud Scale, Execution & Cost Optimization

• Architect and maintain high-throughput, multi-cluster (with blue/green CI deployments), cloud load balancing, resim/orchestration pipelines, and job prioritization for cloud simulation.
• Oversee EC2 sizing and spot queue enablement with automated failover to optimize AWS Cloud expenditures while maximizing compute throughput and queue observability.
• Develop extensible, plug-and-play simulation engine abstractions and interfaces to support modular simulation architectures.
• Ensure ecosystem compatibility and seamless integration across internal tools and frameworks.

Sim Definitions, Pipeline Automation & Tooling

• Build and maintain System Under Test (SUT) definitions along with tooling to support SUT workflows across different simulation modalities.
• Develop infrastructure supporting both local and remote/cloud execution and scaling, including map and scenario infrastructure plumbing.
• Support and maintain data generation pipelines, synthetic data workflows, and automated log-to-synthetic pipelines.
• Establish comprehensive cost, throughput, and queue observability, building real-time metrics dashboards for simulation execution, cluster health, and cloud resource efficiency.
• Lead postmortems, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement initiatives for simulation test stability and infrastructure reliability.

What We're Looking For:

• Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Robotics, Mechatronics, or a closely related engineering field.
• Experience: 7+ years of professional software engineering experience (or 5+ years with a Master's degree) in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or complex cloud infrastructure.
• Technical Leadership: 4+ years of experience leading engineering teams, defining technical roadmaps, and mentoring junior/senior engineers.
• Programming Proficiency: Strong production-level engineering skills in Python and C++ in Linux environments.
• Cloud & Infrastructure Expertise: Deep experience with AWS Cloud scaling, EC2 configuration, spot instances, cluster load balancing, and cloud cost management.
• CI/CD & DevOps: Hands-on experience with GitLab CI/CD pipeline design, Docker containerization, and automated deployment architectures.
• Data & Observability: Proficiency interfacing with databases (SQL, Postgres, Trino) and building observability dashboards (Grafana, Looker).
• Simulation Domain Knowledge: Experience with autonomous driving simulation platforms (e.g., log sim, synthetic simulation, open and closed loop simulation, Neural Generation, World Foundation Models, OpenScenario/OSC2, YAML scenarios).
• Workflow Orchestration: Experience with workflow orchestration engines (e.g., Apache Airflow).

Bonus Points (Not Required)

• Familiarity with Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) bench integration, vehicle CAN protocols, or sensor simulation (Camera, LiDAR).
• Experience with Physics Based Vehicle Dynamics Modeling and industry standard tools.

Working Conditions:

• Hybrid Role: Flexible working locations requiring occasional on-site collaboration at our Las Vegas, NV, Pittsburgh, PA offices.
• Travel: Up to 10% travel for cross-site engineering alignment and team leadership.

#LI-AE1

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 es