Senior/Staff Research Engineer

Who you are

• 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
• 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

What the job involves

• 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
• 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

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO: Unlimited paid time off on top of company holidays to recharge and enjoy as needed
• Flexible working: Flexibile work arrangements and technology to help manage life's demands at the office and remote
• Health benefits: Tiered options in medical, dental, and vision insurance to fit your unique needs
• Future building: Equity, 401k and FSA options for all eligible employees to help build for your future
• Professional development: Company-sponsored professional development opportunities such as conferences, training, and workshops
• Catered lunches: Daily catered lunches at both of our Santa Clara and Fremont offices