Senior AI Autonomy Engineer — Edge ML for Flight

AlleyCorp; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 235,000; Full time

Job summary

Archer Aviation in Silicon Valley seeks an AI Autonomy Engineer to bring intelligent, learned behavior to real aircraft by building and deploying vision-language and multimodal models that let Archer's aircraft perceive, reason, and navigate the real world.

You will advance models from prototype to deployed components running on edge hardware, under real latency and power constraints, collaborating with Safety/Simulation teams. Base pay targets $160,000–$235,000 with pay-for-performance.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience related to position minimum.
• MS, PhD, or equivalent in Computer Science, Robotics, or related field; strong applied ML depth.
• Hands-on experience building, fine-tuning, and/or integrating vision-language or VLA models.
• Solid grasp of transformer architectures and multimodal foundation models; fine-tuning strategies.
• Proficiency with PyTorch; experience in model-serving end-to-end.
• Real 0→1 experience—first version of something new.
• Comfort with ambiguity and lack of fully scoped program.

Responsibilities

• Develop and integrate multi-model systems; VLN/VLA, perception, and language models.
• Design benchmarks, measure success vs baselines, report comparisons transparently.
• Fine-tune and adapt foundation models; tradeoffs as needed.
• Validate via data-driven testing in simulation, on hardware, and in flight tests.
• Take models from prototype to deployed, running on edge hardware under latency/power constraints.

Skills

Vision-language models

Multimodal ML

PyTorch

Transformer architectures

Model serving

Edge deployment

Data-driven testing

Prototype to deployment

Education

MS/PhD in CS/Robotics

Equivalent experience

Tools

Jetson-class devices

Job description

Archer Aviation in Silicon Valley seeks an AI Autonomy Engineer to bring intelligent, learned behavior to real aircraft by building and deploying vision-language and multimodal models that let Archer's aircraft perceive, reason, and navigate the real world.

You will advance models from prototype to deployed components running on edge hardware, under real latency and power constraints, collaborating with Safety/Simulation teams. Base pay targets $160,000–$235,000 with pay-for-performance.