Senior Applied Scientist

Position Overview

Motive is seeking a Senior Applied Scientist to develop and deploy cutting-edge machine learning and deep learning models for its safety and fleet management solutions. This role involves working with LLMs, forecasting, and multimodal deep learning models to drive innovation in areas such as collision detection, driver safety scoring, spend management, and fleet optimization. The position is at the intersection of science and engineering, requiring the candidate to push AI boundaries while ensuring models are robust, scalable, and production-ready.

About the Role

As a key contributor to the Applied Science team, you will work with massive datasets (petabyte-scale), including geospatial, telematics, and sensor data, to build models that enhance decision-making for thousands of fleets. You will collaborate with engineers, product managers, and domain experts to develop novel ML algorithms, optimize inference performance, and deploy models in real-world applications impacting millions of drivers and businesses.

Responsibilities

• Develop, train, and optimize deep learning models for safety, compliance, and fleet operations, including LLMs, transformer models, and multimodal AI.
• Design and implement ML pipelines for large-scale data processing, including feature engineering, model training, and real-time inference.
• Work with vision, telematics, and sensor data (dashcam, GPS, IMU, accelerometers) to improve event detection models (e.g., collision detection, risky driving behavior).
• Fine-tune and distill large models (LLMs, Vision Transformers, etc.) to optimize latency and deployment efficiency on edge devices and cloud infrastructure.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to deploy models into production, ensuring robustness, interpretability, and real-time performance.
• Conduct A/B testing and causal inference studies to evaluate the impact of AI-driven decisions.
• Stay up to date with the latest research in deep learning, generative AI, and optimization methods, bringing innovations into production.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in a quantitative field (CS, AI, Math, Statistics, or related).
• 3+ years of experience in deep learning, machine learning, or applied AI.
• Proficiency in Python (TensorFlow, PyTorch, NumPy, Pandas).
• Strong experience in SQL and handling large-scale datasets.
• Knowledge of transformer models, LLMs, and multimodal AI.
• Experience with ML model deployment on cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Understanding of probability, statistics, and optimization techniques.
• Ability to translate business problems into scientific solutions and communicate technical findings to stakeholders.

Company Information

Who we are: Motive empowers the people who run physical operations with tools to make their work safer, more productive, and more profitable. For the first time ever, safety, operations, and finance teams can manage their drivers, vehicles, equipment, and fleet-related spend in a single system. Combined with industry-leading AI, the Motive platform gives you complete visibility and control, and significantly reduces manual workloads by automating and simplifying tasks.

Motive serves more than 100,000 customers – from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses – across a wide range of industries, including transportation and logistics, construction, energy, field service, manufacturing, agriculture, food and beverage, retail, and the public sector.

Visit gomotive.com to learn more.

Compensation and Benefits

Pay Transparency: Your compensation may be based on several factors, including education, work experience, and certifications. For certain roles, total compensation may include restricted stock units.

Benefits: Motive offers health, pharmacy, optical, and dental care benefits, paid time off, sick time off, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, as well as 401k contributions (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). Learn more about our benefits.

Employment Type

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Salary

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