Software Engineering Manager -Data Platform

About the role

Mission Summary:

We are seeking an experienced and visionary Staff Level Technical Lead Manager to build and lead our new Data Platform team. This pivotal role will drive the strategy, development, and execution of initiatives aimed at significantly accelerating our ML dataset generation and our data warehouse stack. The ultimate goal is to drastically reduce the development cycle for new pipelines, ML models and get us operationally prepared for a driverless future!

You will be a hands-on leader, blending deep technical expertise in data systems and infrastructure with strong leadership and people management skills. You will recruit, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of engineers, fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvements.

What You'll Be Doing:

- Team Leadership & Management:

- Build, lead, and manage a high-performing team of data and infrastructure engineers focused on building out Motional’s Data Stack.

- Define team goals, priorities, and roadmap in alignment with company objectives.

- Provide technical guidance, mentorship, and career development opportunities to team members.

- Technical Strategy & Execution:

- Define the technical vision and strategy for storing metrics and generating ML datasets for large computer vision and behavioral models.

- Identify and evaluate cutting-edge technologies and methodologies for speeding up data loaders for training, ingestion of metrics, and querying of large datasets for everything from dashboards to training.

- Cross-functional Collaboration:

- Collaborate closely with ML research, ML Training platform, and data engineering teams to understand their needs and integrate solutions seamlessly.

- Communicate complex technical concepts and strategies to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

What We're Looking For:

- Experience:

- BS or MS in Computer Science or related field

- 8+ years of professional experience in data platform engineering

- 3+ years of experience in a technical lead or management role with 3-7 direct reports

- Extensive experience with managing large (petabyte plus) scale data platforms such as data warehouses, object storage, and ML training data stores.

- Extensive experience with workflow orchestration frameworks such as Airflow or Step Functions.

- Technical Skills:

- Strong programming skills in Python. C++ experience is a plus.

- Deep knowledge of data storage formats such as Parquet, Iceberg, and Lance and understand their tradeoffs.

- Strong knowledge of cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) solutions and their product offerings.

- Prior experience with building data warehouses or lakehouse architectures at a machine learning or robotics company.

Bonus Points (not required):