Director, Prediction and ML Planning

Misson Summary

Motional is seeking a visionary, technically deep Director of Behaviors to lead our machine‑learning based Prediction and Planning teams. In this role, you will sit at the intersection of intent forecasting and ego‑vehicle decision‑making. You will be directly responsible for leading multiple engineering sub‑teams, setting the technical roadmap for our next‑generation behavior stack, and pioneering the shift toward state‑of‑the‑art end‑to‑end models that execute joint prediction and planning.

• Strategic Leadership:
  Oversee and unify the machine learning‑based Prediction and Motion Planning teams. Establish a clear, aggressive, yet sustainable technical roadmap that transitions our stack towards a unified (fully learned) Large Driving Model performing joint prediction and planning.
• Technical Direction:
  Stay at the absolute frontier of AI research and define the technical roadmap for developing state‑of‑the‑art imitation learning (IL) and reinforcement learning (RL) approaches to advance end‑to‑end learned planning. Guide the team in exploring and incorporating modern paradigms like Vision‑Language‑Action models (VLAs) to improve the vehicle’s semantic understanding, reasoning, and zero‑shot generalization capabilities in complex urban environments.
• Organizational Growth:
  Lead, mentor, and scale multiple sub‑teams of machine learning engineers and researchers. Implement sustainable engineering practices that prevent burnout, promote psychological safety, and ensure high technical velocity.
• Cross‑Functional
  
  Collaboration:
  
  Partner closely with Perception, Infrastructure and Systems Engineering to ensure the Large Driving Model seamlessly integrates onto the vehicle platform and meets rigorous safety and real‑time performance standards.

• Proven Leadership: 5+ years of experience managing high‑performing engineering teams, with at least 3+ years of experience managing multiple sub‑teams within an autonomous systems, robotics, or advanced AI organization.
• Sustainable Scaling:
  Demonstrated track record of growing an engineering organization sustainably—balancing technical debt, architectural scalability, and team well‑being.
• ML Behavior Expertise:
  Deep theoretical and practical proficiency in machine learning applied to robotics behaviors. Advanced expertise in Imitation Learning and Reinforcement Learning for decision‑making. Strong understanding of the full lifecycle from research to vehicle deployment.
• Unified Architectures:
  Proven experience guiding teams toward building integrated models (e.g., trajectory forecasting joint with ego‑policy generation) rather than decoupled, sequential pipelines.
• Modern AI Paradigms:
  Strong familiarity with multimodal foundational AI models, specifically Vision‑Language‑Action models (VLAs).
• Educational Background: M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a related quantitative field with a heavy focus on Machine Learning.

• Experience building and scaling large‑scale LLMs/VLMs/VLAs and successfully deploying to production.
• A strong footprint in the AI/robotics research community (CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICRA, IROS publications), with a willingness to publish future work.
• Experience building large‑scale data pipelines and training infrastructure required to train large driving models.

Motional’s benefits include medical, dental, vision, 401(k) with company match, health savings accounts, life insurance, pet insurance, and more.

We encourage a hybrid schedule with in‑office time at one of our locations in Boston or Pittsburgh to support collaboration, or this role can be fully remote.

Salary Range: $288,000 — $396,000 USD.

Motional AD Inc. is an EOE. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. To comply with Federal Law, we participate in E‑Verify. All newly‑hired employees are queried through this electronic system established by the DHS and the SSA to verify their identity and employment eligibility.