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

Our teams are made up of engineers, researchers, innovators, dreamers, and doers. Together, we can change the world.

All Motional open positions and applications will be posted here on the official website.

Autonomy

Boston, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, Remote U.S. Only

The Safety-Layer Team is responsible for ensuring the Motional Autonomous Vehicle executes appropriate dynamic trajectories in both nominal and safety-critical scenarios. This team focuses on refining upstream motion plans to guarantee compliance with safety-driven requirements, executing highly dynamic evasive maneuvers at the AV's physical limits, and implementing system-wide safety overrides. The team pursues these goals through a process of rigorous algorithmic design, implementation, validation, analysis in simulation, and comprehensive closed-course and public road evaluation.

As the team's responsibilities are growing to support more complex scenarios and the scaling of Motional’s deployment area, we are looking for a Senior Motion Planning - Safety-Layer to help build a robust motion planning safety-layer. You will work on enabling cutting-edge capabilities for Motional’s AV, including algorithm design and documentation, software development, metrics definition, simulation implementation and evaluation, and in-vehicle testing. As part of this role, you will maintain cross-functional relationships across the organization to help understand and communicate the impacts of their work on overall AV performance.

What you will work on:

• Design, implement, and test algorithms for synthesizing trajectories and selecting trajectories across asynchronous generation sources to ensure AV behaviors adhere to safety-critical requirement specifications.
• Develop evasive maneuver planning algorithms in conjunction with low-level control systems to safely use the full actuation capacity of Motional's AV for collision avoidance.
• Evaluate the role of multiple perception sensor modalities in refining the safety-layer's identification of safety-critical scenarios.
• Construct test/analysis tooling for isolated and system-level evaluation of safety-layer components and processes, select test parameters, and analyze test results.
• Utilize, validate, and improve dynamic simulation environments to accelerate the design and analysis of safety-critical motion planning algorithms, including validating simulation models against real-world data.
• Define and implement performance, comfort, and safety metrics for motion planning and safety systems, and perform quantitative analysis of fleet-wide vehicle data to validate design improvements and identify key areas of improvement.
• Build a system-wide understanding of Motional's autonomy stack components by supporting root-cause analysis of simulation, closed-course, and public road events from a motion planning and safety perspective.
• Travel for in-person vehicle testing at Motional's and our partner's deployment and test track locations, typically once every 4 to 6 months.

Desired Background:

• MS, PhD preferred, in one of Control Theory / Robotics / Computer Science / Applied Math or a related field
• 3+ years of experience developing motion planning and collision avoidance related algorithms and components in an industrial setting, preferably the AV industry
• Strong background in modern C++ programming (C++17, C++20), with an emphasis on developing high-performance and reliable systems
• Experienced with concepts from motion planning including trajectory generation through numerical optimization and sampling-based approaches, cost and heuristic-based methods for trajectory selection, multi-modal prediction models, geometric and physics-based collision detection, time-series data processing, and data visualization
• Familiarity with dynamic collision modeling, convex set processing, state machine logic, and multi-rate decision-making processes
• Familiarity with agentic-based development tooling
• Familiarity with Linux-based operating systems

Bonus Points:

• General familiarity with machine learning, including supervised learning, reinforcement learning, training/test validation, etc.
• Familiarity with vehicle dynamics modeling, including standard longitudinal/lateral vehicle dynamics models
• Publications in Robotics/Controls or Autonomous Driving conferences/journals (IROS, ICRA, CoRL, RAL, TRO, CDC, ACC, TAC, CSL, Automatica, IV, ITSC, T-ITS)
• Familiarity with SQL-based queries
• Familiarity with Python
• Familiarity with Gitlab, Bazel, VSCode / CLion
• Familiarity with AV industry simulation tooling

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 estimated compensation range listed in this job posting reflects base salary only. This role may include additional forms of compensation such as a bonus or company equity. The recruiter assigned to this role can share more information about the specific compensation and benefit details associated with this role during the hiring process.

Candidates for certain positions are eligible to participate in Motional's benefits program. Motional's benefits include but are not limited to medical, dental, vision, 401k with a company match, health saving accounts, life insurance, pet insurance, and more.

Salary Range

$172,000 — $229,000 USD

Motional is a driverless technology company making autonomous vehicles a safe, reliable, and accessible reality. We're driven by something more.

Our journey is always people first.

We aren't just developing driverless cars; we're creating safer roadways, more equitable transportation options, and making our communities better places to live, work, and connect. Our team is made up of engineers, researchers, innovators, dreamers and doers, who are creating a technology with the potential to transform the way we move.

We're creating first-of-its-kind technology that will transform transportation. To do so successfully, we must design for everyone in our cities and on our roads. We believe in building a great place to work through a progressive, global culture that is diverse, inclusive, and ensures people feel valued at every level of the organization. Diversity helps us to see the world differently; it's not only good for our business, it's the right thing to do.

Scale up, not starting up.

Our team is behind some of the industry's largest leaps forward, including the first fully-autonomous cross-country drive in the U.S, the launch of the world's first robotaxi pilot, and operation of the world's longest-standing public robotaxi fleet. We're driven to scale; we're moving towards commercialization of our technology, and we need team members who are ready to embrace change and challenges.

Formed as a joint venture between Hyundai Motor Group and Aptiv, Motional is fundamentally changing how people move through their lives. Headquartered in Boston, Motional has operations in the U.S and Asia. For more information, visit www.Motional.com and follow us on Twitter , LinkedIn , Instagram and YouTube .

Motional AD Inc. is an EOE. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. To comply with Federal Law, we participate in E-Verify. All newly-hired employees are queried through this electronic system established by the DHS and the SSA to verify their identity and employment eligibility.

Motional is powered by a uniquely talented, highly experienced team with a diverse set of skills across engineering, robotics, machine-learning, and artificial intelligence.