AI Research Engineer, VLM, Autonomy & Robotics

Tesla; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 124,000 - 420,000; Full time

Job summary

An innovative firm is seeking an AI Research Engineer to advance Vision Language Models (VLMs) for real-world applications. In this dynamic role, you'll leverage extensive datasets and cutting-edge compute resources to enhance the understanding of physical reasoning. Collaborate with a talented team to push the boundaries of AI technology, focusing on model training, dataset creation, and reinforcement learning techniques. This is a unique opportunity to contribute to groundbreaking advancements in AI within a supportive and resource-rich environment.

Benefits

Aetna PPO and HSA plans

Family-building and fertility benefits

Dental and vision plans

401(k) with employer match

Company paid life and disability insurance

Sick and vacation time

Back-up childcare resources

Employee discounts and perks program

Qualifications

• Experience with large-scale vision-language models and multimodal transformers.
• Proven ability to train and optimize models on high-performance clusters.

Responsibilities

• Compute and verify scaling laws for real-world understanding using large GPU clusters.
• Develop and debug large distributed training jobs spanning tens of thousands of GPUs.
• Align pre-trained foundation vision models with large language models.

Skills

Deep Learning

Distributed Systems

Dataset Management

Reinforcement Learning

Collaboration & Communication

Job description

AI Research Engineer, VLM, Autonomy & Robotics

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What To Expect

State-of-the-art Vision Language Models (VLMs) have advanced rapidly, yet they still struggle with physical reasoning and real-world understanding—often due to a “text first, vision second” training paradigm and insufficient large-scale, diverse, real-world datasets. By leveraging Tesla’s extensive global vehicle fleet and our rapidly growing humanoid robot platforms, we aim to reshape how VLMs perceive and interpret the physical world.

In this role, you’ll have access to unparalleled compute resources, massive multimodal real-world datasets, and close collaboration with a small team of world-class AI research engineers. You’ll be involved in every stage of the VLM pipeline—pre-training, alignment, post-training, reinforcement learning, evaluation, distillation, deployment, and efficient inference—pushing the boundaries of vision-language integration for real-world applications.

What You'll Do

1. Compute and verify scaling laws for real-world understanding using large GPU clusters and extensive datasets
2. Develop and debug large distributed training jobs spanning tens of thousands of GPUs
3. Align our pre-trained foundation vision models with large language models for unified perception and language comprehension
4. Build new human-labeled and synthetic datasets addressing real-world tasks and physical reasoning
5. Explore reward functions and SOTA RL techniques to enhance real-world understanding and problem-solving
6. Leverage Tesla’s data to create robust evaluation sets focused on real-world scenarios and physical accuracy
7. Perform knowledge distillation from larger models to smaller, edge-optimized models deployable across Tesla cars and robots
8. Apply quantization, inference-time optimizations, and device-specific tweaks to reduce power consumption and latency

What You'll Bring

• Deep Learning Background: Experience with large-scale vision-language models, multimodal transformers, or related architectures
• Distributed Systems Expertise: Proven ability to train and optimize models on high-performance clusters (thousands of GPUs)
• Practical Dataset Management: Comfort curating or generating large, diverse datasets—human-labeled, synthetic, or both
• Reinforcement Learning Knowledge: Familiarity with RL algorithms and reward function design, especially for complex real-world tasks
• Hands-On Approach: Willingness to iterate quickly on experimental ideas—from pre-training to final deployment
• Collaboration & Communication: Strong cross-functional skills, able to work with AI research engineers, robotics teams, and software groups

Benefits

Along with competitive pay, as a full-time Tesla employee, you are eligible for the following benefits from day 1:

• Aetna PPO and HSA plans with 2 medical plan options with $0 payroll deduction
• Family-building, fertility, adoption, and surrogacy benefits
• Dental (including orthodontic coverage) and vision plans, both with options with a $0 paycheck contribution
• Company Paid HSA Contribution when enrolled in the High Deductible Aetna medical plan with HSA
• Healthcare and Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA)
• 401(k) with employer match, Employee Stock Purchase Plans, and other financial benefits
• Company paid Basic Life, AD&D, short-term and long-term disability insurance
• Employee Assistance Program
• Sick and Vacation time (Flex time for salary positions), and Paid Holidays
• Back-up childcare and parenting support resources
• Voluntary benefits including critical illness, hospital indemnity, accident insurance, theft & legal services, and pet insurance
• Weight Loss and Tobacco Cessation Programs
• Tesla Babies program
• Commuter benefits
• Employee discounts and perks program

Expected Compensation: $124,000 - $420,000 per year + cash and stock awards + benefits. Pay may vary based on location, experience, and other factors. Details will be provided if an offer is made.

Additional Details

• Seniority level: Mid-Senior level
• Employment type: Full-time
• Job function: Engineering and Information Technology
• Industries: Motor Vehicle Manufacturing, Renewable Energy Semiconductor Manufacturing, Utilities

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