Senior Data Scientist, Systems Performance

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:

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