Senior Motion Planning Engineer - Safety Layer

Motional; Boston (MA); Remote; USD 172,000 - 229,000; Full time

Job summary

Motional, a driverless technology company headquartered in Boston, is hiring a Senior Motion Planning - Safety-Layer. You will design and implement safety-critical trajectory algorithms and collaborate with cross-functional teams to advance autonomous driving capability.

The role involves simulation validation, performance metrics, in-vehicle testing, and occasional travel to test tracks. A MS/PhD is preferred, with 3+ years in motion planning and C++ development on high-performance systems.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD preferred in Control Theory, Robotics, CS, Applied Math.
• 3+ years in motion planning and collision avoidance in industry.
• Strong C++ programming (C++17/20) for high-performance systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and test trajectory synthesis and selection algorithms for safety.
• Develop evasive maneuver planning with low-level control integration.
• Evaluate multimodal perception for safety-layer decision-making.
• Build test/analysis tooling for safety-layer components and processes.
• Utilize and improve dynamic simulators; validate against real data.
• Define metrics for performance, comfort, and safety; analyze fleet data.
• Support root-cause analysis of events across simulations and tests.
• Travel for in-person testing every 4–6 months.

Skills

Motion planning

Collision avoidance

C++ (C++17/20)

Linux

Numerical optimization

Trajectory generation

Multi-modal prediction

Data visualization

Robotics

Education

MS/PhD in Control Theory/Robotics/CS/Applied Math

Tools

Gitlab

Bazel

VSCode/CLion

Job description

Motional, a driverless technology company headquartered in Boston, is hiring a Senior Motion Planning - Safety-Layer. You will design and implement safety-critical trajectory algorithms and collaborate with cross-functional teams to advance autonomous driving capability.

The role involves simulation validation, performance metrics, in-vehicle testing, and occasional travel to test tracks. A MS/PhD is preferred, with 3+ years in motion planning and C++ development on high-performance systems.