Motional's Las Vegas office is located less than 10 miles from the Las Vegas strip at 730 E Pilot Road and is home to one of the largest fleets of self-driving vehicles. The city's grid system of roads and being one of America's "smart cities" allows for extensive research and development testing.
This role is based in our Las Vegas office and requires in-office days each week.
Mission Summary
Join us as a key technical leader in Las Vegas as we launch our commercial Autonomous Vehicle (AV) ride service. We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer with a strong product mindset to bridge the gap between our Operations partners and our global Engineering team. You will lead the development of critical operational tools-like fleet management and orchestration systems-while shaping the roadmap to ensure our technology meets real-world needs.
What You'll Be Doing
Hands-on Development & Leadership Build High-Impact Ops Tools: Lead the coding and delivery of frontend and backend services that the Operations team uses daily to monitor and manage the fleet. You will balance long-term scalability with the need for immediate operational solutions.
Act as the primary engineering presence at the Las Vegas AV operation center, providing real-time technical support and troubleshooting to ensure daily mission success.
You will interview and onboard future hires, mentor junior engineers, and define the workflows (handovers, async communication, documentation standards) that enable seamless collaboration between Las Vegas and Singapore.
Product Engineering & Stakeholder Alignment Own the Ops-to-Tech Bridge: Partner deep with Operations, Product, and TPMs to translate complex, real-world fleet challenges into clear, actionable technical requirements for the global engineering team.
Shape the Tooling Roadmap: Drive the vision for our fleet management and orchestration systems. You wont just build tickets; you will identify the right problems to solve to increase fleet efficiency and reduce manual toil.
Feedback Loop Architect: Design processes and features that turn qualitative operational feedback into quantitative data, helping the global team prioritize platform improvements.
What We're Looking For
8+ years of professional experience as a software engineer, with a proven track record of designing and building distributed systems.
Strong Product Mindset: You are obsessed with value. You can look at a chaotic operational floor and architect a software solution that brings order and efficiency.
Experience supporting production systems with a customer-centric mindset and strong communication skills.
Ability to manage stakeholders (Ops, Product) and communicate effectively with a remote engineering team to get things done without owning the entire stack.
Proficiency in Golang / Python for web service and scripting.
Experience building cloud services using SQL and NoSQL databases.
A Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).
Bonus Points (not required)
Experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, and Terraform.
Experience with OLAP databases (e.g., ClickHouse) or building observability tools for monitoring and tracing.
Previous experience in the Autonomous Vehicle (AV), Robotics, or IoT industries.