Mission Summary: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.
What you'll be doing:- 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
What we're looking for:- 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
Bonus points (not required):- 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
The salary range for this role is an estimate based on a wide range of compensation factors including but not limited to specific skills, experience and expertise, role location, certifications, licenses, and business needs. The estimated compensation range listed in this job posting reflects base salary only. This role may include additional forms of compensation such as a bonus or company equity. The recruiter assigned to this role can share more information about the specific compensation and benefit details associated with this role during the hiring process.
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.
Salary Range
$172,000-$229,000 USD
