Key skills
KubernetesAWSHybrid cloud architectureInfrastructure-as-CodeTerraformCloudFormationObservability toolingOpenTelemetryPrometheusGrafanaDatadogAI-driven operationsLarge Language Models (LLMs)Incident response automationPredictive infrastructure scalingTechnical influenceAIGenAIAgenticAirflowEKSGitOpsService MeshCI/CD
About this role
Motional is a driverless technology company making autonomous vehicles a safe, reliable, and accessible reality. As a Principal Engineer within the Platform Engineering group, you will serve as the primary architect for Motional’s global cloud and hybrid infrastructure, leading the technical strategy for hybrid cloud migration and ensuring internal frameworks support rapid AV deployment.
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
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
- 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