Senior Data Engineer, Behavior ML Planning & Prediction
Posted
Summary
Senior Data Engineer at Woven by Toyota (Toyota's mobility arm) building the data foundation for ML-based motion planning in autonomous driving. The role owns end-to-end data architecture and pipelines (ingestion to visualization) using SQL, Python, cloud warehouses like BigQuery/Snowflake, and tooling like dbt and Airflow, in a hybrid Tokyo setup.
About Woven by Toyota
Woven by Toyota is enabling Toyota’s once-in-a-century transformation into a mobility company. Inspired by a legacy of innovating for the benefit of others, our mission is to challenge the current state of mobility through human-centric innovation — expanding what “mobility” means and how it serves society.
Our work centers on four pillars: AD/ADAS, our autonomous driving and advanced driver assist technologies; Arene, our software development platform for software-defined vehicles; Woven City, a test course for mobility; and Cloud & AI, the digital infrastructure powering our collaborative foundation. Business-critical functions empower these teams to execute, and together, we’re working toward one bold goal: a world with zero accidents and enhanced well-being for all.
=========================================================================
TEAM
The Behavior team at Woven by Toyota builds the data foundation for data-driven autonomy. Our work spans a variety of challenges — analyzing petabytes of multimodal fleet and simulation data, designing scalable data pipelines from ingestion to visualization, and delivering the canonical datasets, metrics, and self-serve tools that power ML-based motion planning across both onboard and offboard systems. We are looking for doers and creative problem solvers to join us in improving mobility for everyone with human-centered automated driving solutions.
WHO ARE WE LOOKING FOR?
The team is looking for an experienced Senior Data Engineer to work in close collaboration with our ML and platform teams to source, transform, and serve high-quality datasets — building data pipelines from ingestion to visualization, and providing the tools and introspection that let others build on our data with confidence. You will have the chance to design and own the data architecture behind multiple large-scale projects, unify data products into a single, trusted foundation, and help accelerate the release of models for our next-generation autonomous vehicle platform, influencing millions of Toyota customer vehicles. We are looking for individuals who are passionate about self-driving car technology and its potential impact on humanity.
As a senior member of the team, you will act as a technical leader — mentoring engineers, setting the bar for data engineering craft, and raising the data capability of the teams around you. We highly value a "Giver" mindset — consistently asking "What can I do for you?" — combined with the conviction to advocate for the right long-term design even when it is a harder conversation.
This is a role with significant scope and autonomy. You will set a technical direction that outlasts any single project, thrive on ambiguous, blank-slate problems where the right structure has yet to be defined, and grow your sphere of influence and technical leadership as our data platform matures. It is well suited to an exceptional senior engineer ready to operate at a broader, organization-wide altitude.
You appreciate a hybrid workspace and can come to our Nihonbashi (Tokyo) office three days per week.
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Own and set the technical direction for the end-to-end data architecture that unifies our data into a coherent, discoverable, and reliable platform — evaluating design and operational trade-offs across scalability, reliability, and cost with a long-term view rather than optimizing locally
- Design and build data pipelines from ingestion through transformation to serving and visualization — sourcing, modeling, and delivering the canonical datasets that turn raw fleet and simulation logs into trusted, reusable data, and keeping them consistent across teams
- Set shared technical direction across teams: partner with stakeholders org-wide to understand their data needs, weigh technical trade-offs rigorously and objectively, influence roadmaps, and drive consensus toward a single, trusted data foundation — representing key insights clearly for both technical and non-technical audiences
- Define and own data products, Service Level Agreements, and the self-serve dashboards and tooling that scale analytics across the organization, along with the monitoring, alerting, and operational practices that keep those promises
- De-risk major architectural bets before the organization commits to them, using rapid prototypes and focused technical investigations to turn open questions into evidence-based decisions
- Document architecture, data models, interfaces, and decisions clearly, so that designs, trade-offs, and the resulting datasets are easy for others across the organization to understand, adopt, and maintain
- Act as a technical leader beyond the team: mentor engineers, establish data engineering best practices and standards that other teams adopt, and raise the data capability of the wider Autonomy organization
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS
- 7+ years of experience building and operating production data pipelines and data platforms at scale
- Deep command of SQL and a modern programming language (e.g. Python), and hands-on expertise designing robust data models and multi-step ETL/ELT jobs
- Experience with a cloud data warehouse (e.g. BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift) and with orchestration and transformation tooling (e.g. dbt, Airflow, or equivalents)
- Demonstrated ownership of the data architecture for large-scale systems — setting technical direction and reasoning explicitly about scalability, reliability, security, and cost trade-offs
- A track record of technical leadership across teams — setting engineering standards that others adopt, aligning peers who have competing priorities or differing technical choices, and driving org-wide decisions to closure without formal authority, while growing the capability of other engineers
- Comfort operating in ambiguity — taking a loosely-defined, cross-team problem and creating the clarity, structure, and momentum to solve it
- Excellent communication skills in English, with the ability to explain complex technical trade-offs clearly and persuasively
NICE TO HAVES
- Experience unifying or consolidating data across multiple pipelines, formats, or storage systems onto a common platform, or migrating from bespoke dataset formats to an open table format (e.g. Apache Iceberg) as the basis of a lakehouse architecture
- Experience establishing data products, contracts, and SLAs for widely-used datasets, along with data-quality frameworks and observability
- Experience with large-scale, multimodal data — including spatial and temporal/sequential data (e.g. sensor, log, simulation, time-series, trajectory, or scene/snapshot representations) — and modeling it for reliable downstream use
- Familiarity with autonomous driving or robotics domain concepts (e.g. vehicle motion — kinematics and dynamics, trajectories, coordinate frames; motion planning and prediction; perception; mapping and localization) and how they shape the data we work with
- Familiarity with distributed data processing (e.g. Spark, Ray), workflow orchestration (e.g. Flyte/Union, Airflow), and columnar/lakehouse formats (e.g. Parquet, Iceberg)
- Experience building self-serve analytics products, semantic layers, or BI/dashboarding tooling for cross-functional users
- Business-level proficiency in Japanese
=========================================================================
Important Points
・All interviews will be arranged via Google Meet, unless otherwise stated.
・The same job descriptions are available in both English and Japanese; therefore, we kindly ask that you apply to only one version.
・We kindly request that you submit your resume in English, if possible. However, Japanese resumes are also acceptable. Please note that, depending on the English proficiency requirements of the role, we may request an English version of your resume later in the process.
WHAT WE OFFER
・Competitive Salary - Based on experience
・Work Hours - Flexible working time
・Paid Holiday - 20 days per year (prorated)
・Sick Leave - 6 days per year (prorated)
・Holiday - Sat & Sun, Japanese National Holidays, and other days defined by our company
・Japanese Social Insurance - Health Insurance, Pension, Workers’ Comp, and Unemployment Insurance, Long-term care insurance
・Housing Allowance
・Retirement Benefits
・Rental Cars Support
・In-house Training Program (software study/language study)
Our Commitment
・We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity.
・Any information we receive from you will be used only in the hiring and onboarding process. Please see our privacy notice for more details.