To succeed in the Motional interview process, you must align your preparation with the core dimensions that the engineering team values most.

Role-Related Knowledge & AV Domain Expertise – You must understand the fundamentals of autonomous driving systems, including how sensors (LiDAR, radar, cameras) feed data into perception, localization, planning, and control modules. Be ready to discuss how physical factors like weather, lighting, and road geometry affect software behavior.

Systemic Problem-Solving & Diagnostics – Interviewers want to see how you approach open-ended, highly complex system failures. You must demonstrate a structured debugging methodology, moving logically from high-level symptoms to root-cause analysis using system-level tools.

Safety & Quality Advocacy – At Motional, safety is not a checkbox; it is a core value. In every scenario, you must demonstrate a safety-first mindset, showing that you understand how to mitigate risks during testing, handle safety-critical failures, and advocate for quality even under tight shipping schedules.

Collaborative Leadership & Communication – You will work with diverse engineering teams. You must show that you can translate complex technical bugs into actionable feedback for developers, build consensus on testing standards, and lead cross-functional validation efforts.

The interview process at Motional is thorough, structured, and designed to evaluate both your practical technical skills and your alignment with the company's safety-driven culture. While the exact steps can vary slightly depending on seniority and location, the typical loop consists of progressive stages that test different facets of your engineering capabilities.

The process begins with a standard recruiter phone screen to discuss your background, interest in autonomous vehicles, and basic alignment with the role. This is followed by a technical screen with the hiring manager or a team lead, which dives into your testing philosophy, past projects, and high-level technical understanding.

The final stage is a comprehensive virtual onsite panel. This panel is highly rigorous and typically consists of four to five distinct 45-minute rounds. These sessions are conducted by a diverse group of engineers and stakeholders you would interact with daily. You will face dedicated sessions covering team leadership, system integration, safety/compliance, software development (including a live coding challenge), and AV-specific test planning.

The visual timeline above illustrates the standard path a candidate takes from the initial application to the final decision. Candidates should expect the technical screens to focus heavily on practical application, while the onsite panel evaluates deep system-level knowledge and architectural thinking. Plan for a multi-week process, ensuring you allocate dedicated time to prepare for both the coding and the system diagnostic rounds.

To stand out, you must understand exactly what Motional interviewers are looking for in each specialized technical round.

AV Testing Methodology & Test Planning

This area evaluates your ability to conceptualize, design, and execute test strategies for autonomous driving systems. You must demonstrate that you can break down complex driving behaviors into testable components.

Be ready to go over:

• Simulation vs. Track Testing – Knowing when to use software-in-the-loop (SIL) simulations, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test benches, or closed-course tracks to validate features.
• Edge-Case Generation – How to systematically identify and test rare but high-risk scenarios (e.g., a pedestrian stepping out from behind a parked vehicle).
• Regression Testing – Strategies for ensuring that new software updates do not degrade existing autonomous driving capabilities.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Scenario generation using specialized AV testing standards, and utilizing telemetry data to reconstruct real-world driving events in virtual environments.

Example scenarios:

• "How would you design a test suite to validate the vehicle's behavior when its primary GPS signal is lost in a tunnel?"
• "Explain how you would verify that the vehicle successfully detects and responds to a police officer directing traffic manually."

UNIX Environment & System Diagnostics

Autonomous vehicles are essentially supercomputers on wheels running Linux. You must prove you can navigate, monitor, and debug these systems comfortably via the command line.

Be ready to go over:

• Process & Resource Monitoring – Using utilities like top, htop, ps, and kill to manage onboard processes and identify resource bottlenecks.
• Network Troubleshooting – Utilizing tools such as ping, ifconfig, netstat, tcpdump, and ip to isolate communication failures between sensors and processing units.
• Log Analysis & Text Manipulation – Using grep, awk, sed, tail, and less to efficiently find patterns and errors in massive system logs.

Example scenarios:

• "A LiDAR sensor is intermittently dropping data packets. Walk me through the exact UNIX commands you would run to determine if it is a network configuration issue or a hardware failure."
• "The onboard computer is experiencing sudden slowdowns. How do you identify which process is consuming excessive memory?"

Software Development & Automation (Coding Challenge)

You will be expected to write clean, maintainable code to automate testing pipelines and parse complex diagnostic datasets.

Be ready to go over:

• Scripting Proficiency – Writing clean, idiomatic Python or C++ to solve algorithmic problems or automate repetitive tasks.
• Data Parsing – Extracting, cleaning, and formatting data from structured and unstructured sources (e.g., JSON, CSV, or raw log files).
• Automation Frameworks – Designing test automation scripts that can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines.

Example scenarios:

• "Write a script that reads a sensor diagnostic log, counts the frequency of specific error codes, and flags any sensor that exceeds a failure threshold."
• "Implement an algorithm to find the shortest path or identify anomalies in a stream of coordinate data."