Director, Prediction and ML Planning

About Motional : Motional is a public transit and autonomous vehicle pioneer, developing Level 4 driverless vehicles that are changing the way the world moves. At the heart of our mission is the Autonomy organization, where we solve some of the most complex engineering and artificial intelligence challenges of our generation. Mission Summary: Motional is seeking a visionary, technically deep Director of Behaviors to lead our machine learning-based Prediction and Planning teams. In this role, you will sit at the intersection of intent forecasting and ego-vehicle decision-making. You will be directly responsible for leading multiple engineering sub-teams, setting the technical roadmap for our next-generation behavior stack, and pioneering the shift toward state-of-the-art end-to-end models that execute joint prediction and planning. As a senior leader in the Autonomy organization, you will not only drive technical breakthroughs but will also scale and nurture a world-class AI organization in a sustainable, inclusive, and highly collaborative fashion. Core Responsibilities: Strategic Leadership: Oversee and unify the machine learning-based Prediction and Motion Planning teams. Establish a clear, aggressive, yet sustainable technical roadmap that transitions our stack towards a unified (fully learnt) Large Driving Model performing joint prediction and planning. Technical Direction: Stay at the absolute frontier of AI research and define the technical roadmap for developing state-of-the-art imitation learning (IL) and reinforcement learning (RL) approaches to advance end-to-end learnt planning. Guide the team in exploring and incorporating modern paradigms like Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) to improve the vehicle's semantic understanding, reasoning, and zero-shot generalization capabilities in complex urban environments. Organizational Growth: Lead, mentor, and scale multiple sub-teams of machine learning engineers and researchers. Implement sustainable engineerin