Who we are:
Motive empowers the people who run physical operations with tools to make their work safer, more productive, and more profitable. For the first time ever, safety, operations and finance teams can manage their drivers, vehicles, equipment, and fleet related spend in a single system. Combined with industry leading AI, the Motive platform gives you complete visibility and control, and significantly reduces manual workloads by automating and simplifying tasks.
Motive serves more than 120,000 customers – from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses – across a wide range of industries, including transportation and logistics, construction, energy, field service, manufacturing, agriculture, food and beverage, retail, and the public sector.
Visit gomotive.com to learn more.
About the Role:
As VP of Vehicle and Telematics, you will lead the design, development, and scaling of Motive’s telematics platform — a critical capability that powers connected fleets worldwide. You’ll guide multiple teams delivering firmware, mobile, and backend systems that span from embedded vehicle hardware to cloud-based fleet intelligence. Your leadership will directly influence the safety, reliability, and efficiency of our customers’ operations.
In this role, you are expected to act like the General Manager (GM) for the vehicle telematics business area — owning not just engineering execution, but the overall success of the platform. Acting like a GM means:
- Owning business outcomes: You’re accountable for the success of telematics features and products, including customer satisfaction, performance, and scalability.
- Driving cross-functional alignment: You’ll work across Product, Hardware, Data, Sales, Support, and Operations to ensure the vehicle telematics platform delivers end-to-end value.
- Managing platform strategy: You will shape the roadmap, set priorities, and make tradeoffs to maximize long-term impact across customer needs and business goals.
- Making resource decisions: You will assess build-vs-buy, team sizing, and third-party investments — treating your domain like an autonomous business within Motive.
- Leading with urgency and ownership: You will roll up your sleeves to close gaps, respond to escalations, and ensure that delivery and quality are never compromised.
This is a global leadership role, with engineering teams distributed across San Francisco, Buffalo, Taiwan, and India. You will have a rare opportunity to define and grow a critical platform in a high-scale, fast-paced environment that blends real-world data with intelligent software.
What You’ll Do:
- Lead global teams building advanced telematics firmware, in-vehicle integrations, mobile platforms, and supporting cloud services
- Architect and scale high-performance systems across embedded platforms (bare metal, RTOS, Linux) and mobile OS, with backend infrastructure for configuration, provisioning, OTA updates (FOTA), and diagnostics
- Collaborate with Product, Hardware, and Data Science teams to design customer-focused solutions for safety, reliability, and vehicle intelligence
- Set clear goals, metrics, and ownership across distributed teams; deliver platform-wide initiatives on schedule and at high quality
- Establish and improve our end-to-end Product Development Lifecycle, with a focus on automated testing, CI/CD, and validation
- Mentor and develop engineering leaders; foster a culture of technical excellence, accountability, and ownership
- Partner with external engineering firms to accelerate delivery when appropriate
- Serve as system-level software architect connecting embedded, mobile, server, and manufacturing systems
What We’re Looking For:
- 15+ years of engineering experience, with 5+ years in senior leadership roles across embedded and cloud systems
- Proven success shipping and supporting high-scale connected hardware platforms — millions of devices in market
- Strong foundation in backend system design — experience with microservices, event-driven architecture, data streaming, and distributed systems
- Deep understanding of IoT ecosystems — MQTT, edge computing, secure boot, OTA updates, device provisioning, and telemetry collection
- Experience architecting and operating high-throughput backend systems (e.g., Kafka, DynamoDB, Redis, Kubernetes, AWS/GCP)
- Mastery of system performance, observability, fault tolerance, and horizontal scaling in production environments
- Proficient in multiple languages (e.g., C/C++, Python, Go, Java) across embedded and server contexts
- Familiarity with vehicle communication protocols (e.g., CAN, OBD-II, RP1226, FMS) and automotive data patterns
- Demonstrated success leading globally distributed teams and scaling engineering organizations
- Strong collaboration skills and ability to influence technical strategy across cross-functional teams
- Understanding of data compliance and security in the context of fleet and vehicle data
- Expertise in telematics systems, including GPS tracking, OBD, accelerometers, and video telematics integration
- Awareness of fleet management applications including driver behavior monitoring, fuel analytics, route optimization, and predictive maintenance
- Experience with software QA processes, test automation, CI/CD tooling, and metrics-driven quality management
Why Join Us
At Motive, you’ll play a pivotal role in building the connected vehicle platform that powers the backbone of the physical economy. You’ll work with passionate teams solving meaningful problems at a massive scale. We are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace, and we welcome candidates from all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives.
Join us in driving the future of intelligent operations.
Creating a diverse and inclusive workplace is one of Motive's core values. We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives.
Please review our Candidate Privacy Notice here .
UK Candidate Privacy Notice here.
The applicant must be authorized to receive and access those commodities and technologies controlled under U.S. Export Administration Regulations. It is Motive's policy to require that employees be authorized to receive access to Motive products and technology.
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What We Do
Motive builds technology to improve the safety, productivity, and profitability of businesses that power the physical economy. The Motive Automated Operations Platform combines IoT hardware with AI-powered applications to automate vehicle and equipment tracking, driver safety, compliance, maintenance, spend management, and more. Motive serves more than 120,000 businesses, across a wide range of industries including trucking and logistics, construction, oil and gas, food and beverage, field service, agriculture, passenger transit, and delivery. Visit gomotive.com to learn more.
Why Work With Us
We work hard, with humility and we see our efforts rewarded in tangible ways every day. At Motive, you’ll have the chance to make a difference for the drivers who keep our world moving. We trust each other to do great work because together we can achieve collective goals that reach beyond the physical economy.
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