Senior / Staff Frontend Software Engineer - Map Creator

Revolutionize the future of autonomous driving with us. We are seeking a talented Senior or Staff Software Engineer to join our Map Creator team.

Your work will be critical for Motional’s scalability and expansion. The successful candidate will be integral to the development of a cutting-edge, web-based semantic map annotation editor for our autonomous vehicles. This role involves managing massive-scale map data, by ensuring it can be edited, validated, and visualized, while maintaining great performance. Furthermore, you will also take part in automating map generation processes and designing efficient user workflows to drive operational profitability. Your contributions will directly shape the future of transportation.

If you're passionate about building impactful, user-friendly solutions and thrive in a collaborative, innovative environment, this is the opportunity you've been waiting for.

What You'll Be Doing

You will help build and improve the tools that make autonomous vehicle mapping faster, more reliable, and more scalable.

Core Responsibilities:

• Design, build, test, and maintain our web-based 2D/3D map editor, visualization tools, and validation systems.
• Optimize performance across CPU, memory, rendering, networking, and concurrency to support workflows involving terabytes of map data.
• Develop map generation and validation automations using efficient algorithms to improve mapping productivity.
• Work closely with Machine Learning teams to integrate ML-based automation into map annotation workflows.
• Collaborate with international engineering, research, and operations teams to understand problems and deliver practical solutions.
• Leverage modern AI development tools and contribute to integrating agentic AI capabilities and guardrails into our development workflows.

Senior Engineer:

• Own and deliver end-to-end multi-month projects, from architecture to deployment and maintenance.
• Design scalable, high-performance solutions that optimize system UX and reliability.
• Evaluate technical trade-offs and propose architectural and roadmap enhancements.
• Provide impactful code/design reviews and mentor team members through technical challenges.

Staff Engineer:

• Define multi-quarter technical roadmaps aligned with product strategy and operational goals.
• Lead complex, cross-functional initiatives and translate ambiguous problems into clear execution plans.
• Own core Map Creator architecture, driving key decisions on scalability, performance, and reliability.
• Align stakeholders, influence cross-team technical direction, and advise leadership on priorities.
• Establish engineering standards for design, testing, quality, and developer productivity.
• Proactively identify technical risks and opportunities to boost delivery velocity.
• Mentor engineers, including Senior Engineers, fostering technical excellence and growth.
• Remain hands-on with prototyping, system design, and solving complex technical challenges.

What We're Looking For

Core Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years (or equivalent) of experience building complex production applications.
• Strong experience with TypeScript, React, and modern software development practices.
• Solid understanding of engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, architecture, concurrency, parallelization, observability, and design patterns.
• Ability to take ownership of solutions from requirements and design through implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to communicate technical decisions and trade-offs clearly.
• Expertise in at least one of the following areas:
• Building complex editor applications with advanced state management and user interactions.
• Geospatial data processing and modern mapping systems.
• High-performance visualization using WebGL or WebGPU.
• UI/UX design for complex technical workflows and tools.

Senior Engineer:

• Proven track record of delivering multi-month engineering projects with high quality and reliability.
• Ability to solve ambiguous technical problems and make sound architectural decisions independently.
• Experience mentoring engineers and collaborating cross-functionally.

Staff Engineer:

• Proven ability to lead multi-quarter technical initiatives spanning multiple engineers.
• Track record of defining technical direction and resolving complex, ambiguous problems with minimal guidance.
• Experience owning system-level architecture and driving high-impact technical decisions.
• Ability to align stakeholders, influence cross-team direction, and link engineering initiatives to business outcomes.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising engineering standards across teams.

Bonus Points

• Experience working on autonomous vehicles and HD maps.
• Experience building applications that process and visualize large-scale datasets.
• Experience integrating ML-based automation or agentic AI into production applications.
• Experience improving developer productivity, engineering infrastructure, or complex data processing systems.

Why This Role?

This isn't just another web application. As one of our engineers has said, it’s a rare, genuinely fun frontend opportunity to take a big part in building highly interactive, 2D/3D editing tools that shape the physical world.

You will work on challenging engineering problems spanning graphics, algorithms, products, automation, and user experience. Your contributions will help reduce mapping turnaround time, streamline operations, and support Motional's scalability and expansion.

Whether you join as a Senior Engineer driving complex projects or a Staff Engineer shaping the team's technical direction, you will have the opportunity to make a meaningful impact on autonomous driving technology.