Principal Engineer Team Lead, Simulation Infrastructure

Motional•Boston, MA

1d•$200,000 - $275,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Motional is seeking a Principal Engineer Team Lead to join and lead their Simulation Infrastructure team within the Testing Services organization. This role is responsible for the technical and team leadership in designing, building, scaling, and optimizing the cloud and software infrastructure that powers their Software-in-the-Loop (SIL) simulation framework and offboard validation pipeline. The position involves leading a team responsible for processing millions of simulation runs monthly, optimizing cloud compute resources, building robust scenario library infrastructure, and integrating simulation capabilities into Motional’s software release gating lifecycle. The work directly contributes to accelerating autonomy development, improving build health, and ensuring safe software releases.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Robotics, Mechatronics, or a closely related engineering field.
7+ years of professional software engineering experience (or 5+ years with a Master’s degree) in autonomous vehicles, robotics, or complex cloud infrastructure.
4+ years of experience leading engineering teams, defining technical roadmaps, and mentoring junior/senior engineers.
Strong production-level engineering skills in Python and C++ in Linux environments.
Deep experience with AWS Cloud scaling, EC2 configuration, spot instances, cluster load balancing, and cloud cost management.
Hands-on experience with GitLab CI/CD pipeline design, Docker containerization, and automated deployment architectures.
Proficiency interfacing with databases (SQL, Postgres, Trino) and building observability dashboards (Grafana, Looker).
Experience with autonomous driving simulation platforms (e.g., log sim, synthetic simulation, open and closed loop simulation, Neural Generation, World Foundation Models, OpenScenario/OSC2, YAML scenarios).
Experience with workflow orchestration engines (e.g., Apache Airflow).

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) bench integration, vehicle CAN protocols, or sensor simulation (Camera, LiDAR).
Experience with Physics Based Vehicle Dynamics Modeling and industry standard tools.

Responsibilities

Lead, mentor, and grow a team of simulation infrastructure engineers across multiple locations.
Define and execute the multi-year technical roadmap for Simulation Infrastructure, aligning team goals with broader Autonomy and Testing Services objectives.
Partner cross-functionally with Release, SIL Runtime, Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL), and Autonomy development teams to expand test coverage and streamline offboard validation.
Architect and maintain high-throughput, multi-cluster (with blue/green CI deployments), cloud load balancing, resim/orchestration pipelines, and job prioritization for cloud simulation.
Oversee EC2 sizing and spot queue enablement with automated failover to optimize AWS Cloud expenditures while maximizing compute throughput and queue observability.
Develop extensible, plug-and-play simulation engine abstractions and interfaces to support modular simulation architectures.
Ensure ecosystem compatibility and seamless integration across internal tools and frameworks.
Build and maintain System Under Test (SUT) definitions along with tooling to support SUT workflows across different simulation modalities.
Develop infrastructure supporting both local and remote/cloud execution and scaling, including map and scenario infrastructure plumbing.
Support and maintain data generation pipelines, synthetic data workflows, and automated log-to-synthetic pipelines.
Establish comprehensive cost, throughput, and queue observability, building real-time metrics dashboards for simulation execution, cluster health, and cloud resource efficiency.
Lead postmortems, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement initiatives for simulation test stability and infrastructure reliability.