Senior Motion Planning Engineer: Trajectory Optimization

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

Job summary

Motional is seeking a driven engineer to advance autonomous vehicle motion planning, control, and software development. The role focuses on building and evaluating state-of-the-art motion control and trajectory optimization algorithms for production-ready robotaxis.

With 3-5+ years in C++ and a background in robotics or related engineering, you will work across design teams, mentor peers, and contribute to scalable software and robust optimization techniques.

Qualifications

• 3-5+ years of C++ software development.
• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD preferred in Robotics, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience with Model Predictive Control (MPC), motion planning, planning under uncertainty, vehicle dynamics and control, and simulation environments.
• Understanding of numerical optimization algorithms (interior point method, sequential quadratic programming, etc).
• Experience with optimization solvers (IPOPT, Gurobi, etc).
• Past experience owning and leading technical development on features from problem formulation, algorithm design, through implementation.
• Knowledge of Python is a bonus.

Responsibilities

• Understands and explains trade-offs, complex concepts to peers and leaders to drive decisions.
• Collaborate with teams working on (ML) decision/behavior planning, prediction, and vehicle control to build comprehensive and integrated solutions.
• Creates project proposals that drive long-term technical roadmaps and span multiple sub-systems.
• Mentor junior team members to develop a culture of product-focused engineering, research, and development.

Skills

C++ software development

Model Predictive Control

Motion planning

Planning under uncertainty

Vehicle dynamics and control

Simulation environments

Python (bonus)

Education

Bachelor's/Master's/PhD in Robotics, CS, CE, EE or related field

Tools

IPOPT

Gurobi

Job description

Motional is seeking a driven engineer to advance autonomous vehicle motion planning, control, and software development. The role focuses on building and evaluating state-of-the-art motion control and trajectory optimization algorithms for production-ready robotaxis.

With 3-5+ years in C++ and a background in robotics or related engineering, you will work across design teams, mentor peers, and contribute to scalable software and robust optimization techniques.