Senior/Staff Research Engineer — Vision-Language-Action Models (Autonomous Driving)

PlusAISanta Clara, CaliforniaOn-siteFull-timeSenior, 5–8 yearsListed 3 days ago

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About this role

You will join our core AI team at the frontier of autonomous decision-making, building the Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models that form SuperDrive's reasoning layer. You'll train VLA models that generate high-level driving decisions and trajectory guidance for on-board strategic decision-making, and design the knowledge distillation and compression techniques that transition large models onto on-board compute.

Responsibilities

- Design, train, and evaluate Vision-Language-Action models that generate high-level driving decisions and trajectory guidance in support of Plus's reasoning layer.

- Own a VLA workstream end to end — data, architecture, large-scale training, and on-vehicle validation.

- Build training and evaluation pipelines and rigorous metrics for VLA performance in driving contexts.

- Develop distillation and compression recipes to deploy large reasoning models on on-board compute.

- Apply SFT and RL post-training to improve reasoning, robustness, and long-tail behavior.

- Collaborate with perception, planning, and platform teams to bring models from research to production

Required qualifications

- M.S. minimum, Ph.D. preferred in CS, EE, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field.

- 3+ years implementing and training models in a deep learning framework (PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX).

- Direct, hands-on experience training vision-language / vision-language-action models.

- Hands-on experience with model training, evaluation, and deployment in production.

- Thorough understanding of state-of-the-art vision-language / VLA models, diffusion, flow matching, and transformers.

- Experience with large-scale / distributed model training.

Preferred Qualifications

- Model distillation, quantization, and inference optimization (ONNX/TensorRT, mixed precision, custom kernels).

- SFT and RL post-training of large multimodal models.

- Hands-on experience with multi-modal sensor data (camera, LiDAR, radar).

- Publications at top venues (CVPR, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CoRL, RSS, ICRA).

- Autonomous driving / ADAS experience.

Your opportunities joining PlusAI
Work, learn and grow in a highly future-oriented, innovative and dynamic field.
Wide range of opportunities for personal and professional development.
Catered free lunch, unlimited snacks and beverages.
Highly competitive salary and benefits package, including 401(k) plan.