Senior ML Engineer, Vision-Language-Action Foundation Model

XPENG; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 175,000 - 296,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Real-world data access

Top-tier research team

Impact on mobility

Transportation revolution

Competitive compensation

Snacks, meals & events

Job summary

XPENG is hiring a full-time Machine Learning Engineer / Research Scientist to advance the Vision-Language-Action foundation model powering its autonomous driving systems. You will design multi-modal architectures, train on diverse data, and collaborate across perception, planning, and infra teams to deliver production-ready models.

The role emphasizes large-scale pretraining, cross-modal alignment, and deployment optimization, with direct impact on XPENG's next-generation L3/L4 autonomy and

Qualifications

• Master’s degree or higher in CS/EE/related, with 3+ years of deep learning research or productization.
• Strong proficiency in PyTorch and transformer-based model design.
• Experience in large-scale pretraining or multi-modal modeling (vision, language, or planning).
• Deep understanding of representation learning, temporal modeling, and self-supervised or RL techniques.
• Familiarity with distributed training (DDP, FSDP) and large-batch optimization.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement large-scale multi-modal architectures for end-to-end autonomous driving.
• Develop pretraining and fine-tuning strategies using massive labeled and unlabeled data (images, video, LiDAR, CAN bus, maps).
• Research and integrate cross-modal alignment to improve interpretability and action quality.
• Scale training across thousands of GPUs using distributed training frameworks (FSDP, DDP).
• Conduct systematic ablation, evaluation, and visualization of model behavior across perception, reasoning, and planning tasks.
• Contribute to model deployment optimization, including quantization, export, and latency–accuracy trade-offs.

Skills

PyTorch

Transformer models

Multi-modal modeling

Distributed training

Representation learning

Temporal modeling

Reinforcement learning

Education

Master's degree or higher in CS/EE

PhD in CS/CE/EE (preferred)

Tools

DDP

FSDP

Job description

XPENG is hiring a full-time Machine Learning Engineer / Research Scientist to advance the Vision-Language-Action foundation model powering its autonomous driving systems. You will design multi-modal architectures, train on diverse data, and collaborate across perception, planning, and infra teams to deliver production-ready models.

The role emphasizes large-scale pretraining, cross-modal alignment, and deployment optimization, with direct impact on XPENG's next-generation L3/L4 autonomy and