Senior Motion Planning Engineer — Safety Layer

Motional; Oregon; Hybrid; USD 172,000 - 229,000; Full time

Job summary

Motional is seeking a Senior Motion Planning - Safety-Layer to advance safety-critical trajectory design for its autonomous vehicles in the United States. You will design, implement, and test algorithms for synthesizing and selecting trajectories, and collaborate with low-level control to maximize safe actuation.

The role covers simulation, metrics, and in-vehicle testing, plus cross-functional communication and travel for on-track validation every 4–6 months.

Qualifications

• MS/PhD preferred in Control Theory / Robotics / CS / Applied Math or related field.
• 3+ years in motion planning and collision avoidance algorithms in an industrial setting, preferably AV.
• Strong background in modern C++ (C++17, C++20) and high-performance systems.
• Experience with trajectory generation via numerical optimization and sampling-based methods.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and test algorithms for synthesizing and selecting trajectories across asynchronous generation sources to ensure safety-compliant AV behavior.
• Develop evasive maneuver planning algorithms with low-level control for collision avoidance.
• Evaluate perception modalities to refine safety-layer safety-critical detection.
• Create test/analysis tooling for isolated and system-level evaluation of safety-layer components.

Skills

C++17/20

Motion planning

Linux

Trajectory generation

Collision avoidance

Education

MS/PhD preferred

Tools

Gitlab

Bazel

VSCode/CLion

Job description

Motional is seeking a Senior Motion Planning - Safety-Layer to advance safety-critical trajectory design for its autonomous vehicles in the United States. You will design, implement, and test algorithms for synthesizing and selecting trajectories, and collaborate with low-level control to maximize safe actuation.

The role covers simulation, metrics, and in-vehicle testing, plus cross-functional communication and travel for on-track validation every 4–6 months.