Staff Engineer, Platform Engineering

Motional•Pittsburgh, PA

22h

About The Position

As a Staff Engineer within the Platform Engineering team, you will be a hands-on technical leader driving the evolution of Motional's global cloud and hybrid infrastructure. Operating as a senior individual contributor, you'll tackle our hardest platform problems directly — designing systems, creating code, and setting technical direction for initiatives that span multiple teams. Your work will help transform our R&D environment into a hardened, cost-efficient, and scalable commercial backbone, and ensure our internal platforms deliver the developer velocity required for rapid AV deployment.

Requirements

Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
9 years in Software or Infrastructure Engineering, with significant experience in a senior IC capacity
Deep, expert-level knowledge of Kubernetes internals and ecosystem (Operators (Crossplane, ArgoWorkflow/Airflow, KubeRay), Kubecost/OpenCost, Service Mesh, GitOps and other CNCF projects)
Proven track record of designing or migrating complex workloads between on-prem data centers and major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, other)
Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform/CloudFormation, Terraform Cloud/Spacelift/Atlantis) and advanced observability tooling (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus/VictoriaMetrics, 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

Proven expertise in CI/CD orchestration, build systems (Bazel, RBE), frameworks
Prior experience with large-scale machine learning training pipelines
Experience leading technical projects in a globally distributed team
Open-source contributions to Kubernetes, observability, or infrastructure tooling ecosystems

Responsibilities

Design and build major components of our cloud architecture — including networking, storage, compute abstraction layers. You'll own the technical design end-to-end and create code where it matters most
Drive technical evolution of our Kubernetes-based developer platform. Identify the highest-leverage improvements to scalability, cost attribution, access control, and developer ergonomics — then design and implement them to reduce configuration complexity and accelerate engineering velocity
Raise the reliability bar across Platform Engineering. Define and implement standards for SLIs, SLOs, observability, and failover, and partner with peer teams to roll them out across platform-layer services
Drive FinOps practices — cost visibility, attribution, accountability as well as optimization recommendations
Design and ship AI-native developer experiences by integrating LLM-powered tooling into CI, build systems, monitoring platforms, and local development workflows to remove friction and boost engineering throughput