Principal Software Engineer - AI Data Engine
$200,000–$275,000 year
HybridBoston, Massachusetts, United States
Job Summary
Anchor the technical strategy and architecture for Motional's new AI Data Engine team, defining the vision for storing metrics and generating ML datasets for large computer vision and behavioral models. Lead a high-performing team of data and infrastructure engineers by influencing technical roadmaps, establishing rigorous engineering standards, and providing deep peer mentorship. Collaborate closely with ML research, training platforms, and data engineering teams to co-design scalable architectures for ingesting metrics, querying large datasets, and building agentic workflows for automated data processing. Act as a hands-on contributor to complex architectural challenges while driving consensus and communicating strategies to both technical and non-technical stakeholders to accelerate development cycles for new pipelines and models.
Required Qualifications
- BS or MS in Computer Science or related field
- 6+ years of professional experience in data platform engineering
- 3+ years of experience in a technical lead, staff engineer, or senior architecture role
- proven track record of driving cross-team technical initiatives and mentoring senior engineers
- Extensive experience with managing large (petabyte plus) scale data platforms such as data warehouses, object storage, and ML training data stores
- Extensive experience with workflow orchestration frameworks such as Airflow or Step Functions
- Strong programming skills in Python
- Proven experience designing, building, and deploying agentic workflows and multi-agent systems using frameworks like LangChain, LlamaIndex, DSPy, or custom LLM orchestration tools for reasoning and automated data processing
- Knowledge of modern data storage formats (Parquet, Iceberg) and vector databases (LanceDB, Milvus, Qdrant) and retrieval architectures (RAG) to manage massive multimodal datasets (video, sensor data, text)
- Strong knowledge of cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) solutions, distributed compute, and scalable model serving
- Prior experience building data warehouses, lakehouse architectures, or active-learning data loops at an advanced machine learning, robotics, or autonomous vehicle company
- hybrid schedule with in-office time at one of our locations in Boston, Pittsburgh, or Las Vegas to support collaboration, or this role can be fully remote
Desired Qualifications
- C++ experience
- Prior experience in autonomous vehicles (AV)
- Prior experience with Bazel based build systems
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