Liam Shanahan

ClearMotion

Aug 14, 2025

ClearMotion – Systems Engineering Internship

At a Glance

Supported the Head of Systems Engineering in implementing the V-model development framework to unify cross-disciplinary automotive teams.
Built Atlassian-based project tracking, ticketing, and requirements management tools to establish traceability across electrical, mechanical, and software domains.
Created baseline documentation to accelerate development cycles while meeting stringent automotive standards.

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My Role

When I joined ClearMotion it was still a startup out of MIT. The company was in the midst of rapid growth—approaching 100 employees—and was scaling its active suspension technology for luxury vehicles. The system combined high-performance actuators, sensors, and control software to actively counteract bumps and body roll, delivering a smooth, controlled ride. This was a complex, safety-critical product involving electrical, mechanical, software, and compliance teams, all needing to work in sync.

I worked directly under the new Head of Systems Engineering, whose mission was to introduce the V-model development process to streamline coordination. In the automotive world, the V-model is a structured, traceable engineering framework:

On the left side of the V, requirements are defined at progressively detailed levels—starting from high-level customer needs, through system specifications, to detailed component designs.
On the right side, each stage has a corresponding integration and verification step, ensuring that every requirement is validated against the original objectives.
The horizontal links across the V enforce traceability, so that every design decision and test can be tied back to a requirement, and vice-versa.

My work focused on making the V-model real inside the organization. This included:

Designing Atlassian Jira/Confluence workflows for requirements tracking, linking each ticket to its associated verification activities.
Creating requirements management baselines to capture the agreed-upon starting point for each design iteration.
Setting up project timelines and dashboards so engineering teams could see dependencies across disciplines and work toward common milestones.
Supporting systems architecture development to ensure the active suspension could adapt to different vehicle platforms while meeting ISO 26262 functional safety guidelines.

The result was a more unified development process where mechanical, electrical, and software engineers could work rapidly, yet with clear alignment and compliance readiness—a critical foundation for bringing a complex automotive technology to market.