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

PlusAI

Santa Clara, CA, United States Posted October 2, 2026

Check how well your resume matches this job

On-site Full-time Senior
Salary Range

$170,000 - $260,000

Job Description

Join our core AI team as a Senior/Staff Research Engineer, where you will be at the forefront of autonomous decision-making. You will design, train, and evaluate Vision-Language-Action models that generate high-level driving decisions and trajectory guidance. You will own a VLA workstream end to end, build training and evaluation pipelines, and collaborate with various teams to bring models from research to production. Enjoy benefits such as unlimited PTO, flexible working arrangements, health benefits, equity options, professional development opportunities, and catered lunches.

  • Conception, training, and evaluation of Vision-Language-Action models for high-level driving decisions.
  • Ownership of a VLA workstream from data collection to on-vehicle validation, including architecture and large-scale training.
  • Collaboration with cross-functional teams to transition models from research to production, ensuring rigorous performance metrics.
  • 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
  • Thorough understanding of state-of-the-art vision-language / VLA models, diffusion, flow matching, and transformers
  • Experience with large-scale / distributed model training
  • Hands-on experience with model training, evaluation, and deployment in production
  • 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
Required Skills
decision making collaboration cross-functional collaboration statistics deep learning PyTorch TensorFlow Hugging Face
How to apply

You apply on PlusAI’s own careers site. No account needed.

Apply on company site
How well do you match?

Upload your resume and ARes scores it against this job in a few seconds. No account needed.

Your resume is read to calculate the match and then deleted. Nothing is saved.

Already have access? Sign in
About PlusAI

See every open role at PlusAI on ARes.

More Jobs at PlusAI
Share This Job