Principal Engineer Team Lead, Safety & Targets

Motional is a driverless technology company developing autonomous vehicles. The Principal Engineer Team Lead will lead the Safety & Targets team, owning safety-critical functions, quantitative performance benchmarks, validation, safety-case evidence, and regulatory support for autonomous driving systems. The role also involves scaling tooling and automation, mentoring engineers, and collaborating cross-functionally to support commercial launch criteria.

Responsibilities:

• Own Motional’s safety critical functions: Drive the development and maturation of collision detection and response and imminent collision handling across autonomy, remote vehicle assistance, and operational functions. Define the requirements, thresholds, and response behaviors, then prove them out
• Own the benchmark program across safety, comfort, and assertiveness: Establish and expand human driving benchmarks for all three dimensions across every key capability area, not safety alone. Close the gap where capabilities have launch criteria but no benchmark, and convert each benchmark into measurable acceptance criteria that autonomy teams can implement against.Advance our next-generation evasive maneuver and preventability modeling to enable direct comparison against human drivers in imminent collision situations
• Own Coverage and Gap analysis: Define what sufficient coverage for our validation looks test suites look like, identify gaps and work cross functionally to close them
• Deliver the safety case evidence: Own the systems engineering lifecycle deliverables such as hazard analysis, STPA, HAZOP, FMEA, requirements, and coverage for safety critical systems. Sustain and expand safety case claims through external assessment and regulatory review
• Scale through tooling and automation: Productionize crash database analysis, collision event ingestion and labeling, and automated continuous monitoring reports so safety insight scales faster than fleet miles
• Lead and scale: Mentor and grow a high-performing engineering team. Foster a culture of technical excellence, scientific rigor, and data-driven decision-making
• Cross-functional collaboration: Partner with Autonomy, Infrastructure, Operations, Legal, and the other Systems teams to drive design improvements and ensure features generate a net positive effect on system safety, comfort, and assertiveness and meet our launch criteria

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree and 7+ years of experience in Systems Engineering, Functional Safety, Autonomous Systems, or Robotics, with deep expertise in one and working knowledge of the others. Or Master's degree/PhD and 5+ years of experience
• 3+ years of experience leading safety-critical development, validation, or safety assurance programs for autonomous driving or other emerging safety-critical technologies
• A hands-on technical leader with a proven track record of growing small, high-performing teams
• Demonstrated track record defining quantitative performance targets and acceptance criteria spanning safety, comfort, and assertiveness and producing the analysis and evidence that justifies them
• Working expertise in hazard and safety analysis methods such as STPA, HAZOP, FMEA, and hazard analysis and risk assessment
• Expert at leveraging large-scale simulation, track, and road data to extract actionable technical insights that drive resolution with development teams
• Familiarity with SOTIF, ISO 26262, UL4600, and AVSC behavior competencies and other industry standards
• Proven track record of building consensus across multidisciplinary teams by leveraging technical influence over organizational authority
• Experience with collision and crash data analysis, including public crash databases and regulatory incident reporting
• Strong foundation in statistical methodology, data science, and scientific rigor; proficiency in Python, SQL, and data visualization
• Experience establishing and leveraging industry benchmarks and human naturalistic driving behavior to evaluate autonomous driving safety, ride comfort, and assertiveness
• Familiarity with ride comfort and motion-sickness modeling, or with metrics that balance assertiveness against conservatism in driving policy
• Experience presenting safety argumentation to external assessors, regulators, or certification bodies
• Excellent communication skills; capable of articulating complex concepts to technical peers and executive leadership alike
• Self-starter with a proactive mindset for driving ambiguous projects to completion
• Experience publishing safety research or white papers, or participating in industry consortia
• Experience collaborating within agile environments and global, distributed teams