Motional

Senior Data Scientist, Systems Performance

Work from home

Remote role where the employee must remain based in a particular country.

United States only

From the listing details: Source listing states candidate location: "Boston, Massachusetts, United States; Las Vegas, Nevada, United States; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States; Remote U.S., Boston, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, Remote U.S. Only"

Employer listed it 11 days ago · Added 3 weeks ago

Been open since 3 weeks ago, still being checked, but it has been live a while.

Salary

$149,000 to $198,500

Location

United States only

Timezone

US East

Contract

Full-time

Experience

Senior

What the advert says

Quoted word for word from the employer's advert. Where it says nothing, we say so.

Working hours: Not mentioned in the advert
Where you can work from: We encourage a hybrid schedule with in-office time at one of our locations in Boston, Pittsburgh, or Las Vegas to support collaboration, or this role can be fully remote.
Contract: Not mentioned in the advert
Experience asked for: Not mentioned in the advert
Pay: The salary range for this role is an estimate based on a wide range of compensation factors including but not limited to specific skills, experience and expertise, role location, certifications, licenses, and business needs.

Remote flexibility

Work from home

This is a remote role, but the employee must be based in United States. It is work from home rather than work from anywhere.

What the employer says

Source listing states candidate location: "Boston, Massachusetts, United States; Las Vegas, Nevada, United States; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States; Remote U.S., Boston, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, Remote U.S. Only"

What Nomaders makes of it

Residency required in United States
Payroll and tax are likely handled in that country only

The quotes above are the employer's own words; the reading is ours. Always check the original listing and employment terms before working from another country.

Before you apply

Questions worth asking: Nomaders interpretation

The advert does not say whether this is employment or a contractor arrangement. Ask, as it affects tax and benefits.

Produced automatically from this advert's text; not reviewed by a person. The employer's own page is the final word.

About the role

Mission Summary:

The Systems Readiness and Performance team is the crucial bridge between software development and real-world deployment. We are responsible for driving system design, for verifying and validating the autonomy stack, and for defining, measuring, and validating system performance targets. We work closely with stakeholders in autonomy, infrastructure, and operations to build the definitive safety case for the commercial launch of our fully driverless IONIQ 5 robotaxis in Las Vegas.

Rigorous behavioral and system performance evaluation is critical to scaling our service and achieving Motional's long-term goals. We are seeking a Senior Data Scientist to lead initiatives that improve evaluation and testing methodologies, measure the quality and trustworthiness of our evaluation portfolio, and partner with engineering teams to monitor and strengthen the health of the evaluation ecosystem. You will help ensure Motional's performance evaluation is efficient, scientifically rigorous, and aligned with our growth priorities.

In this role, you will lead development of evaluation methodologies and metrics that assess the quality and business relevance of solutions spanning on-road and off-board data. You will influence the evaluation signals software engineers rely on to validate that changes to the autonomy stack deliver intended improvements, conduct deep-dive analyses to understand bottlenecks in current methodologies, and prototype improvements in metrics, sampling strategy, and statistical inference. You will develop deep expertise in how evaluation signals inform launch and release decisions, weigh trade-offs across the evaluation portfolio, and provide actionable insights for designing launch criteria.

If you are a rigorous, collaborative data scientist with a passion for improving how autonomous systems are measured and validated at scale, we encourage you to apply.

What You’ll Be Doing:

Lead the development of evaluation frameworks for the autonomous system, connecting technical problems to rigorous, data-driven approaches for measuring and validating performance.

Collaborate closely with Functional Safety and Systems Engineering teams to ensure evaluation metrics map effectively to automotive safety standards (e.g., SOTIF, ISO 21448) and launch readiness decisions.

Ensure evaluation metrics are reliable enough to inform safety cases and launch readiness decisions.

Monitor the reliability of evaluation metrics and incoming performance data over time, including detecting drift, inconsistencies, and degradation in metric definitions, to ensure the evaluation ecosystem remains accurate and trustworthy.

Drive our approach to performance analysis using data-backed statistical methods for simulation and on-road data.

Develop new statistical analysis methods to analyze AV performance data and lead by example in applying them to real problems.

Partner with triage operators and simulation engineers to turn raw disengagements and identified edge cases into procedural or generative scenarios, feeding them back into the simulation catalog to strengthen test coverage.

Use fleet and evaluation data to identify edge cases in an automated manner and coverage gaps, and partner with engineering to feed novel scenarios back into the simulation catalog and strengthen test coverage.

Build confidence in the evaluation framework through data-driven insights and clear communication of findings to technical leaders and stakeholders.

Establish correlation between on-road and simulation data to improve how we interpret and act on evaluation results.

Make sense of large datasets to drive insights, solve ambiguous performance questions, and communicate results effectively across teams and upward to leadership.

Establish a self-service model for developers to understand the impact of their changes.

Develop new metrics, interpret trends, and investigate anomalies in simulation and on-road data.

Collaborate with developers to drive action based on these results.

Serve as an advisor and influence collaborators across multiple teams, promote data-aware decision making, and establish best practices around the use of data.

Mentor and collaborate with fellow engineers and foster a positive, collaborative work environment.

Introduce the use of ML methods for performance evaluation where they add rigor and scale.

What You Bring:

Requirements

·5+ years of industry experience solving complex problems with large datasets, with a track record of framing ambiguous questions into rigorous, data-driven analyses.
·Bachelor's or higher degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Data Science, Robotics, Physics, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field. Master's or PhD preferred.
·Strong problem-solving skills: ability to break down complex performance and evaluation challenges, think logically, and remove bias from how problems are defined and assessed.
·Strong Python and SQL skills, with demonstrated experience using data analysis libraries to work with large, complex datasets.
·Experience applying advanced statistical and ML methods to drive insights from large and complex data sets.

Benefits

No benefits package published with this listing. Ask about it at first interview.

How to apply

1Check the flexibility label above, work from home, matches where you plan to live and work.
2Tailor your CV to the role at Motional, mentioning your remote working experience and working hours (US East).
3Apply directly on the employer's careers page using the button below. Nomaders never handles your application.

Found 19d ago. Last checked today. Always confirm the details on the original posting, salary and location can change after publication.

Listing sourced from Company boards.