Principal Platform Engineer

Motional

4d • $200,000 - $275,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

As a Principal Engineer within the Platform Engineering group, you will serve as the primary architect for Motional’s global cloud and hybrid infrastructure. Your mission is to evolve our current R&D environment into a hardened, cost-efficient, and scalable commercial backbone. You will lead the technical strategy for our hybrid cloud migration and ensure our internal frameworks provide the velocity required for rapid AV deployment.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
• 12+ years in Software or Infrastructure Engineering, with significant experience in a Principal or Architect capacity
• Deep, expert-level knowledge of Kubernetes internals and ecosystem (EKS, Operators (KubeRay, ArgoWorkflow, Airflow), Service Mesh, GitOps)
• Proven track record of designing and migrating complex workloads between on-prem data centers and AWS
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform/CloudFormation, Terraform Cloud/Spacelift/Atlantis) and advanced observability tooling (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog)
• Expert in architecting AI-driven operations, leveraging LLMs and agentic workflows to automate incident response, predictive scaling, and intelligent system observability
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical roadmaps across an entire engineering organization and mentor senior technical staff.

Nice To Haves

• Expert-level experience managing and architecting solutions using Equinix datacenter products and services (e.g., Equinix Fabric, Network Edge, Metal) to enable high-speed hybrid cloud connectivity (AWS Direct Connect)
• Prior experience in the Autonomous Vehicle, Robotics, or large-scale IoT/Fleet Management industries.
• Experience leading technical projects in a globally distributed team
• Proven expertise in CI/CD orchestration, build systems (Bazel), frameworks

Responsibilities

• Architect and drive the execution of our hybrid cloud strategy. You will design the networking, security, and compute abstraction layers that allow seamless workload mobility between on-premises high-performance computing (HPC) and AWS.
• Serve as the primary architect for our Kubernetes-based developer framework. You will identify and implement core improvements to the framework to enhance scalability, cost tracking and access control, reduce configuration complexity, and increase developer velocity.
• Lead organization-wide initiatives to harden service reliability. You will define the standards for observability, failover strategies, and production-grade stability across all platform-layer services.
• Prototype and deploy GenAI-focused tooling and agents to automate Platform Engineering tasks. This includes leveraging LLMs for automated incident response, predictive infrastructure scaling, and intelligent log analysis.
• Act as the final technical authority for infrastructure decisions, ensuring all new platform services align with long-term scalability and security goals.

Benefits

• Candidates for certain positions are eligible to participate in Motional’s benefits program.
• Motional’s benefits include but are not limited to medical, dental, vision, 401k with a company match, health saving accounts, life insurance, pet insurance, and more.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Number of Employees: 251-500 employees