Principal Engineer Team Lead, Simulation Infrastructure

Motional • Boston, MA

11d • $200,000 - $275,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Motional is seeking a Principal Engineer Team Lead for its Simulation Infrastructure team within the Testing Services organization. This technical and team leadership role is responsible for designing, building, scaling, and optimizing the cloud and software infrastructure powering Motional’s Software-in-the-Loop (SIL) simulation framework and offboard validation pipeline. The team processes millions of simulation runs per month, optimizes cloud compute resources, develops scenario library infrastructure, and integrates simulation capabilities into the software release-gating lifecycle.

The position leads and develops a distributed team of simulation infrastructure engineers and defines the multi-year technical roadmap in alignment with Autonomy and Testing Services objectives. It partners with Release, SIL Runtime, Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL), and Autonomy development teams to expand test coverage and streamline validation.

The role oversees cloud simulation infrastructure, including multi-cluster architectures, blue/green CI deployments, load balancing, resimulation and orchestration pipelines, job prioritization, EC2 sizing, spot-instance queues, and automated failover. It also develops modular simulation engine abstractions, SUT definitions and tooling, local and cloud execution support, map and scenario infrastructure, data-generation and synthetic-data pipelines, and observability for costs, throughput, queues, cluster health, and resource efficiency. The team lead drives postmortems, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvements to simulation stability and infrastructure reliability.

This is a hybrid role requiring occasional onsite collaboration in Las Vegas, Nevada, or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with up to 10% travel for cross-site engineering alignment and team leadership. The listed base salary range is $200,000–$275,000 USD; the position may also include bonus or company equity. Eligible candidates may participate in Motional’s benefits program, which includes medical, dental, vision, a 401(k) with company match, health savings accounts, life insurance, and pet insurance, among other benefits.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) bench integration, vehicle CAN protocols, or camera and LiDAR sensor simulation.
• 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 in alignment with Autonomy and Testing Services objectives.
• Partner with Release, SIL Runtime, HIL, and Autonomy development teams to expand test coverage and streamline offboard validation.
• Architect and maintain high-throughput, multi-cluster cloud simulation infrastructure, including blue/green CI deployments, cloud load balancing, resimulation and orchestration pipelines, and job prioritization.
• Oversee EC2 sizing and spot-queue enablement with automated failover to optimize AWS expenditures while maximizing compute throughput and queue observability.
• Develop extensible simulation engine abstractions and interfaces that support modular simulation architectures.
• Ensure compatibility and integration across internal tools and frameworks.
• Build and maintain System Under Test (SUT) definitions and tooling for workflows across simulation modalities.
• Develop infrastructure for local and remote/cloud execution and scaling, including map and scenario infrastructure.
• Support and maintain data-generation pipelines, synthetic-data workflows, and automated log-to-synthetic pipelines.
• Establish cost, throughput, and queue observability, including real-time 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.

Benefits

• Medical insurance
• Dental insurance
• Vision insurance
• 401(k) with company match
• Health savings accounts
• Life insurance
• Pet insurance
• Additional benefits are available; details are provided during the hiring process.
• The role may include bonus or company equity.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal