Motional · 2 months ago
Principal Engineer, Platform & Applications
Las Vegas, Nevada, United States
Full-time
Hybrid
Lead/Staff
$175K/yr - $234K/yr
12+ years expMotional is a driverless technology company making autonomous vehicles a safe, reliable, and accessible reality. They are seeking an exceptionally talented Principal Engineer for the Platform & Apps Group, responsible for defining the architecture and governance across all Developer Platform functions, ensuring technical excellence that scales with the organization.
AutomotiveAutonomous VehiclesFleet ManagementInformation TechnologySoftware
Responsibilities
Define and own the multi-year technical architecture and standards for the entire Developer Platform ecosystem, ensuring resilience, performance, and scalability across all internal tools and infrastructure
Act as the technical decision-maker and expert consultant for complex architecture challenges within Platform Engineering and Enablement, ensuring alignment across technical roadmaps
Champion and architect solutions that enforce technical standards, drive code quality, and automate governance across the entire developer lifecycle
Elevate the organization's technical capability by providing expert-level consulting, conducting rigorous design reviews, and introducing advanced architectural patterns to all engineering teams within the Platform Group
Own the architectural evolution and technical governance of the mission-critical Bazel build system and associated toolchains, ensuring optimized, reproducible, and hermetic builds for our core product
Define the technical standards for Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices and CI/CD pipeline governance (GitLab) for critical developer services, focusing on optimizing efficiency, uptime, and developer experience (DX)
Architect and lead the implementation of systems for measuring and improving engineering performance, utilizing established metrics frameworks (e.g., DORA, FLOW, SPACE)
Establish and enforce unified technical standards and best practices for cloud security, operational monitoring, and reliability that govern development across the entire Platform & Apps organization
Provide expert technical consultation on the highest-risk architectural decisions related to Cloud Applications, focusing solely on adherence to platform standards and risk mitigation
Drive technical initiatives for achieving cloud resource optimization and cost efficiency across all AWS-hosted services within the Platform & Apps portfolio
Qualification
Required
12+ years of progressive experience in Software Engineering, with a significant focus on Platform Engineering, Developer Experience, or Build/Release Engineering
5+ years acting as a Principal Engineer, Chief Architect, or equivalent Individual Contributor role, demonstrating the ability to set technical strategy and drive architectural initiatives across multiple functional teams
Core Systems Mastery: Mandatory expert-level proficiency in advanced build systems (Bazel), complex CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI/GitHub Actions), and modern configuration/deployment technologies
Platform & Tooling Architecture: Deep expertise in architecting, designing, and scaling complex internal developer platforms, including experience with Developer Portals (e.g., Backstage) and internal service-oriented applications built with Node.js/Go/Python
Cloud & Systems Expertise: Strong knowledge of Cloud Architecture (AWS preferred), distributed systems design, SRE principles, and performance engineering
Exceptional technical communication, negotiation, and influence skills with the ability to articulate and defend complex architectural concepts to both technical and executive audiences
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
Preferred
Prior experience in the Autonomous Vehicle, Robotics, or large-scale IoT/Fleet Management industries
Direct experience architecting and customizing a Backstage-based developer portal in a large-scale engineering organization
Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform/CloudFormation) and advanced observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog)
Proven expertise in defining and implementing DORA or other engineering performance metrics frameworks
Benefits
Medical
Dental
Vision
401k with a company match
Health saving accounts
Life insurance
Pet insurance
And more
Company
Motional
Motional offers an autonomous driving platform for robotaxi providers, fleet operators, and automotive manufacturers.
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Motional has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (56)
2024 (111)
2023 (57)
2022 (110)
2021 (100)
2020 (7)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageTotal Funding
unknown2024-05-03Acquired
2024-03-15Seed
Leadership Team
Laura Major
President and CEO
Balajee Kannan
Vice President, Autonomy
Recent News
2026-01-07
2026-01-07
2025-12-19
Company data provided by crunchbase