Real-Time Linux Systems Performance Engineer

Motional; Pittsburgh (Allegheny County); Hybrid; USD 149,000 - 198,500; Full time

Job summary

Motional’s Platform Infrastructure organization builds and operates the foundational onboard software systems for our autonomous vehicles. We are seeking a Linux Systems Performance Engineer to improve performance, reliability, and observability of our onboard compute platform in a hybrid Pittsburgh role.

You will design observability infrastructure, develop metrics and tooling, and work with autonomy and platform teams to diagnose and resolve resource contention, latency spikes, and system

Qualifications

• Strong experience debugging and optimizing Linux system performance.

Responsibilities

• Design and build low‑overhead observability infrastructure for resource usage, latency, scheduling behavior, and system health.
• Develop metrics, tracing, profiling, and analysis tools that identify performance contention and explain system behavior.
• Improve real‑time and post‑event root cause analysis across CPU, memory, storage, networking, and other shared resources.
• Partner with autonomy and platform teams to investigate crashes, latency spikes, missed deadlines, resource exhaustion, and performance regressions.
• Analyze application, operating system, kernel, and hardware interactions on embedded Linux compute platforms.
• Translate investigations into durable improvements, including tooling, alerts, dashboards, performance requirements, and architectural changes.
• Define performance benchmarks and regression tests for onboard systems.
• Evaluate the performance impact of new software, hardware, and system configurations.

Skills

Linux performance

OS concepts

C/C++

Python scripting

Perf tracing tools

eBPF/BPF

bpftrace

Tools

perf

ftrace

eBPF

BCC

bpftrace

flame graphs

Job description

Motional’s Platform Infrastructure organization builds and operates the foundational onboard software systems for our autonomous vehicles. We are seeking a Linux Systems Performance Engineer to improve performance, reliability, and observability of our onboard compute platform in a hybrid Pittsburgh role.

You will design observability infrastructure, develop metrics and tooling, and work with autonomy and platform teams to diagnose and resolve resource contention, latency spikes, and system