Principal Staff Engineer – Indoor Location Intelligence & Sensor Fusion

Company Overview

At Motorola Solutions, we believe that everything starts with our people. We’re a global close-knit community, united by the relentless pursuit to help keep people safer everywhere. We build and connect technologies to help protect people, property and places. Our solutions foster the collaboration that’s critical for safer communities, safer schools, safer hospitals, safer businesses, and ultimately, safer nations. Connect with a career that matters, and help us build a safer future.

Department Overview

Motorola Solutions' innovations, products, and services play essential roles in people's lives. Our end-to-end suite of software solutions helps customers manage emergency communications, process video and evidence, and leverage cutting-edge AI-driven analytics for security and operational insights. We are industry leaders in video security and analytics, with solutions deployed in more than 120 countries across diverse environments such as school campuses, transportation systems, healthcare centers, public venues, critical infrastructure, prisons, factories, casinos, airports, financial institutions, government facilities, and retailers.

Our AI-powered security solutions integrate advanced video analytics, machine learning, and embedded intelligence to enable proactive threat detection, enhanced situational awareness, and automated decision-making.

Job Description

We're seeking a highly skilled Principal Staff Engineer – Indoor Location Intelligence & Sensor Fusion with in-depth expertise in RF modeling, signal processing, and applied AI/ML. This is a hands-on role where you will design and optimize the algorithms that power our next-generation indoor location platform. You’ll work at the intersection of Wi-Fi, BLE, RTT (802.11mc), CSI, and IMU sensors, transforming noisy real-world RF data into accurate, real-time positioning at scale.

Your Mission:
Model & Innovate: Architect and develop AI-driven models for indoor localization, including fingerprinting, similarity scoring, probabilistic grid-cell prediction, and lightweight sensor fusion.
Understand the Physics: Build and refine path-loss, RF propagation, and multipath-aware models to improve accuracy, robustness, and stability.
Extract the Signal: Apply advanced signal processing techniques, filtering, smoothing, noise reduction, and time-series modeling to transform raw RF, CSI subcarrier data, and IMU inputs into high-quality features.
Fuse Intelligence: Combine Wi-Fi RSSI, Channel State Information (CSI), BLE RSSI, RTT timestamps, and IMU patterns to produce hybrid models that outperform single-sensor approaches.
Experiment Relentlessly: Evaluate accuracy using ground-truth traces, run controlled experiments, tune hyperparameters, and improve model confidence scoring.
Operationalize Intelligence: Deploy models into real-time scoring pipelines, collaborating with cloud engineering to ensure sub-100ms inference and large-scale reliability.
Collaborate & Elevate: Work closely with firmware, data, RF, QA, and product teams. Mentor peers in algorithmic reasoning and modeling excellence.

Qualifications:

Education: Master’s degree with 8+ years of relevant work or a PhD (preferred) with 6+ years of professional experience in AI/ML, Electrical Engineering, CS, Applied Math, Robotics, or a related technical discipline.
RF & Sensors: Solid understanding of RF propagation, indoor multipath, path-loss modeling, RTT distance estimation, and Channel State Information (CSI) extraction.
CSI & Fine-Grained Sensing: Practical knowledge of using subcarrier-level Wi-Fi CSI amplitude and phase metrics to resolve multipath interference and improve positioning resolution beyond RSSI.
Signal Processing Specialist: Experience with filtering, phase unwrapping, Kalman/EMA smoothing, noise modeling, and time-series feature extraction.
Data Wrangler: Strong Matlab, Python skills (NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, scikit-learn) and experience working with Wi-Fi RSSI, CSI datasets, BLE RSSI, RTT/FTM, and IMU streams.
AI/ML Engineer: Hands-on experience with clustering, probabilistic modeling, similarity metrics, and lightweight ML classification/regression.
Production Mindset: Experience deploying algorithms to real-time, enterprise-scale systems with tight latency constraints.
Algorithm Scientist Thinking: Able to analyze noisy data, design robust models, validate hypotheses, and convert prototypes into production-ready logic.

Desired skills:
Experience with indoor positioning systems (IPS), robotics navigation, or embedded/mobile sensor pipelines.
Knowledge of 802.11mc/802.11az, BLE 5.x, or sensor-fusion frameworks.
Hands-on experience with AoA/AoD estimation techniques derived from CSI or antenna arrays.
Experience in cloud AI deployment (GCP/Azure/AWS).

Target Base Salary Range: $140,000 - $160,000 USD
Consistent with Motorola Solutions values and applicable law, we provide the following information to promote pay transparency and equity. Pay within this range varies and depends on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The actual offer will be based on the individual candidate.

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Basic Requirements

Master’s degree with 6+ years OR a PhD with 4+ years of professional experience in AI/ML, Electrical Engineering, CS, Applied Math, Robotics, or a related technical discipline.

Travel Requirements

Under 10%

Relocation Provided

None

Position Type

Experienced

Referral Payment Plan

Yes

Our U.S. Benefits include:

• Incentive Bonus Plans

• Medical, Dental, Vision benefits

• 401K with Company Match

• 10 Paid Holidays

• Generous Paid Time Off Packages

• Employee Stock Purchase Plan

• Paid Parental & Family Leave

• and more!

EEO Statement

Motorola Solutions is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status or any other legally-protected characteristic. 

We are proud of our people-first and community-focused culture, empowering every Motorolan to be their most authentic self and to do their best work to deliver on the promise of a safer world. If you’d like to join our team but feel that you don’t quite meet all of the preferred skills, we’d still love to hear why you think you’d be a great addition to our team.

We’re committed to providing an inclusive and accessible recruiting experience for candidates with disabilities, or other physical or mental health conditions. To request an accommodation, please complete this Reasonable Accommodations Form so we can assist you.