Staff Engineer, Platform Engineering

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

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
• 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
• 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
• Motional is a driverless technology company making autonomous vehicles a safe, reliable, and accessible reality. We're driven by something more.
• Our journey is always people first.
• Higher purpose, greater impact.
• Scale up, not starting up.

Benefits

Additional Information

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.

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