Senior Motion Planning and Control Engineer

Position Overview

• Location Type: Hybrid
• Job Type: Full-time
• Salary: Not specified

The Controls Team is responsible for the synthesis and execution of dynamic trajectories by the Motional Autonomous Vehicle. This team focuses on the generation of comfortable and safe trajectories for the AV, the design of control systems that interface with vehicle platform actuators, and the communication interfaces that relay trajectory information to low-level control modules. The team pursues these goals through rigorous algorithmic design, validation, analysis in simulation, and comprehensive closed-course and public road evaluation.

We are seeking a Senior Motion Planning and Controls Engineer to help build a robust motion planning and control pipeline, supporting the scaling of Motional’s deployment area. This role will involve algorithm design and documentation, software development, metrics definition, simulation implementation and evaluation, and in-vehicle testing. The team member will also maintain cross-functional relationships across the organization to understand and communicate the impacts of their work on overall AV performance.

Requirements

• Experience in motion planning and controls.
• Knowledge of low-level controllers, state estimators, and state-machine logic.
• Familiarity with vehicle platform sensors and actuators.
• Experience with trajectory interface design.
• Ability to develop and implement test/analysis tooling.
• Experience with dynamic simulation environments.
• Understanding of performance, comfort, and safety metrics.
• Experience with optimization and machine learning frameworks (desirable).
• Ability to conduct root-cause analysis of vehicle events.
• Willingness to travel for in-person vehicle testing.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and test low-level controllers, state estimators, and state-machine logic that directly interface with platform sensors and actuators to produce performant, comfortable, and safe motion tracking.
• Integrate upstream trajectory generation and downstream motion tracking controllers through principled trajectory interface design, including generator / controller state machine logic design and trajectory communication formulation.
• Develop test/analysis tooling for isolated evaluation of motion tracking performance and incremental integration testing that incorporates upstream components (trajectory generation, planning, perception, etc.), select test parameters, and analyze test results.
• Architect and implement dynamic simulation environments that accelerate the design and analysis of motion planning and control algorithms, including validation of simulation models against real-world data.
• Define and implement performance, comfort, and safety metrics for motion planning and control, and perform quantitative analysis of fleet-wide vehicle data to validate design improvements and identify key areas of improvement.
• Formulate, implement, analyze, and test optimization and machine learning-based frameworks for dynamic trajectory synthesis.
• Build a system-wide understanding of Motional’s autonomy stack components by supporting root-cause analysis of simulation, closed-course, and public road events from a motion planning and control perspective.
• Travel for in-person vehicle testing at Motional’s and our partner’s deployment and test track locations, typically once every 4 weeks.