Senior/Staff Research Engineer – Vision-Language-Action Models, Autonomous Driving

Plus

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

Posted 9/15/2026full-timeSanta Clara • California • United StatesSenior💰 $170,000 - $260,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in designing and evaluating Vision-Language-Action models, with a strong focus on large-scale training and deployment in autonomous driving contexts. Proficient in collaborating across teams to transition models from research to production while ensuring robust performance metrics.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Vision-Language-Action Model DevelopmentDeep Learning Frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX)Model Training and EvaluationLarge-Scale Distributed Model TrainingState-of-the-Art VLA Models

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Hard Skills

Model TrainingModel EvaluationData ArchitecturePerformance MetricsDistillation and Compression RecipesSFT and RL Post-TrainingTrajectory GuidanceDriving Decision GenerationOn-Vehicle ValidationVision-Language Model Implementation

Certifications & Qualifications

M.S. in Computer ScienceM.S. in Electrical EngineeringM.S. in MathematicsM.S. in Statistics

Industry Keywords

Autonomous DrivingDeep LearningMachine LearningArtificial IntelligenceComputer VisionRobustnessLong-Tail BehaviorDiffusion ModelsTransformersResearch to Production

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

PyTorchTensorflow

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Design, train, and evaluate Vision-Language-Action models that generate high-level driving decisions and trajectory guidance for Plus's reasoning layer
Own a VLA workstream end to end, including 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
Build Vision-Language-Action models forming SuperDrive's reasoning layer for autonomous trucks

Requirements

What you’ll need

M.S. minimum in CS, EE, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field
3+ years implementing and training models in a deep learning framework such as 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

Benefits

Comp & perks

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
401(k) plan