Mission Summary:
At Motional, we're transforming how autonomous vehicles discover critical intelligence hidden within petabytes of multimodal sensor data. Our next-generation autonomous driving stack depends on finding the rare edge cases, long-tail scenarios, and model errors that matter most. Omnitag , our ML-powered multimodal data mining framework, is the engine that powers this discovery.
As a Senior Machine Learning Engineer on the Data Mining team, your mission is to build the "Brain" of this engine: designing massive multimodal Teacher models that understand the world, and distilling them into hyper-efficient Student models that can scour exabytes of data in near real-time. You will work at the intersection of large-scale representation learning, retrieval optimization, and reasoning systems. Your work will directly influence how we compress knowledge into efficient encoders for fast search, and how we apply reinforcement learning to optimize data discovery workflows and intelligent querying. By building smarter mining tools, you will accelerate the entire model improvement lifecycle for teams working on post-training analysis, error diagnosis, and dataset curation.
What You'll Do:
- Architect and Train Distilled Models: Design and implement teacher-student model frameworks for multimodal sensor data. Develop training pipelines for knowledge distillation. Ensure student models maintain high accuracy while drastically reducing inference latency and memory footprint.
- Reinforcement Learning for Data Discover : Build RL-based policy learning and reasoning systems for autonomous driving applications. Implement and scale RL training workflows (e.g., PPO, DQN, actor-critic methods) for simulation and real-world interaction. Explore reward shaping, environment modeling, and multi-agent RL where applicable.
- Optimize Model Deployment for Real-Time Inference: Collaborate with backend engineers to deploy distilled and RL models into production. Optimize for latency, throughput, and hardware efficiency across GPU/CPU clusters. Implement model versioning, A/B testing, and monitoring for performance regressions.
- Research and Integrate Agentic Systems: Explore and prototype agentic workflows for autonomous reasoning, chain-of-thought prompting, and goal-directed behavior. Integrate such systems into our broader autonomy stack as experimental or production components.
- Drive Production Reliability : Establish patterns for graceful degradation, fault tolerance, and cost optimization. Operate Omnitag as a mission-critical data platform serving the entire ML organization, with a focus on reliability, debuggability, and operational excellence.
- Mentor and Collaborate : Work closely with ML scientists, data engineers, and autonomy teams to translate research advances into scalable engineering solutions. Guide junior engineers in best practices for model training, evaluation, and deployment.