Principal Engineer, Tech Lead – Embodied AI, Off-Board Performance Evaluation

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Principal Engineer overseeing development of AI monitoring frameworks for autonomous vehicles at Motional. Collaborate across teams to enhance safety metrics and performance evaluation.

Posted 7/30/2026full-timeBoston • Massachusetts, Nevada, Pennsylvania • 🇺🇸 United StatesSenior💰 $200,000 - $275,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

Use this summary to align your resume positioning with the role.

Demonstrates expertise in architecting and integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for autonomous vehicle systems, with a strong focus on performance metrics evaluation and efficient data processing. Proficient in developing frameworks and tools for complex system analysis and operational design domain applications.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Large Language Models (LLMs)Vision-Language Models (VLMs)Python ProgrammingAutonomous Vehicle Systems DevelopmentCloud Vector Databases

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Software EngineeringApplied AI/MLParameter-Efficient Fine-TuningAdversarial Scenario GenerationPerformance Metrics Calculation

Soft Skills

Analytical SkillsProblem-Solving Skills

Tools & Technologies

LanceDBRetrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)Metrics Engine (ME)

Industry Keywords

Autonomous Vehicle PerformanceSemantic Scene DescriptionsEgo-Centric KinematicsOperational Design DomainsDirect Vector-LLM Fusion

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

CloudPython

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Technically oversee the architecture to identify, describe, and enrich events in historical vehicle logs using Multimodal LLMs.
Oversee the off-board ingestion and fusion of semantic scene descriptions, ego-centric kinematics, and internal autonomy telemetry to create a holistic diagnostic context for LLM inference.
Develop structured prompting templates utilizing Contextual Prompting (CP), Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and In-Context Learning (ICL) to evaluate scenarios.
Architect the integration of foundation models into the Metrics Engine (ME), designing efficient cascade filtering and log slice parallelization strategies to scale high-volume LLM inference across simulation and on-road drive logs while managing computational latency and costs.
Define, design, and implement key metrics to evaluate autonomous vehicle performance, such as lane change capability, oscillations, and braking.
Deploy and manage a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) vector database containing codified AV Driving Policies to ground off-board LLM evaluations in specific Operational Design Domains.
Serve as a technical escalation point and collaborate with Autonomy (Planner, Prediction, Perception) and Systems teams to deliver high-signal, enriched events.
Drive the transition toward Direct Vector-LLM Fusion utilizing emerging Physical AI ecosystems and open-weights Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to process telemetry off-board without text-translation bottlenecks.

Requirements

What you’ll need

10+ years of professional experience in software engineering, applied AI/ML, or autonomous vehicle systems development.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Robotics, or a related field.
Proven experience working with Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for reasoning, parsing, and scene description.
Experience with parameter-efficient fine-tuning and deploying open-weights models on internal infrastructure.
Familiarity with local and cloud vector databases, such as LanceDB, for housing output vector embeddings.
Experience with adversarial scenario generation and closed-loop simulation environments.
Strong background leveraging software to develop frameworks, libraries, and tools for calculating and aggregating AV performance metrics.
Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, particularly in the context of complex system performance evaluation.
Expert-level proficiency in Python and strong understanding of software development principles.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Medical insurance
Dental insurance
Vision insurance
401k with company match
Health saving accounts
Life insurance
Pet insurance