Senior Motion Planning Engineer, Safety Layer

Motional; Las Vegas (NV); On-site; USD 172,000 - 229,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

401k with company match

Paid time off

Pet insurance

Job summary

Motional is seeking a Senior Motion Planning - Safety-Layer to advance robust motion planning for autonomous vehicles. You will design, implement, and validate trajectory synthesis and evasive maneuvers, while coordinating with sensing, control, and simulation teams to ensure safety-critical compliance.

Occasional travel for testing is required. The role emphasizes building metrics, validating simulation against real-world data, and contributing to the autonomy stack with cross-functional impact

Qualifications

• Must have advanced degree in a related field or equivalent industrial experience.
• Strong background in motion planning, trajectory generation, and safety-critical systems.
• Proficiency in C++ and Linux environments is essential.
• Experience with high-performance, reliable software for autonomous systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and test trajectory synthesis and selection across sources to meet safety specs.
• Develop evasive maneuvers with low-level control for collision avoidance.
• Evaluate perception modalities for safety-layer improvements.
• Build test tools and analyze results for system-wide evaluation.
• Create simulation environments and validate models against real data.
• Define metrics for performance, safety, and comfort; analyze fleet data.
• Support root-cause analysis of events from motion planning and safety perspectives.
• Travel for in-person vehicle testing about every 4–6 months.

Skills

C++17/20

Motion planning

Robotics

Linux

Trajectory generation

Simulation testing

Python

Education

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

Tools

Gitlab

Bazel

VSCode/CLion

Job description

Motional is seeking a Senior Motion Planning - Safety-Layer to advance robust motion planning for autonomous vehicles. You will design, implement, and validate trajectory synthesis and evasive maneuvers, while coordinating with sensing, control, and simulation teams to ensure safety-critical compliance.

Occasional travel for testing is required. The role emphasizes building metrics, validating simulation against real-world data, and contributing to the autonomy stack with cross-functional impact