Senior Staff VLA Engineer for Autonomous Driving

Rival; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Free lunch

Snacks and beverages

401(k) plan

Job summary

PlusAI, a Physical AI company, seeks experts to advance Vision-Language-Action models for autonomous trucking. You will own data, architecture, and large-scale training, moving models from research to production on on-board compute.

The role requires MS with PhD preferred in related fields, and 3+ years in deep learning model training. Experience with PyTorch/TensorFlow/JAX is expected.

Qualifications

• MS degree minimum, PhD preferred in CS/EE/math/statistics or related field.
• 3+ years implementing and training models in a deep learning framework.
• Hands-on experience training vision-language / VLA models.
• Experience with large-scale distributed model training.

Responsibilities

• Design, train, and evaluate Vision-Language-Action models for driving decisions.
• Own a VLA workstream end to end—from data to on-vehicle validation.
• Build training/evaluation pipelines with rigorous metrics for VLA performance.
• Develop distillation and compression for on-board compute.
• Apply SFT and RL post-training to improve reasoning and robustness.
• Collaborate with perception, planning, and platform teams to production.

Skills

Deep learning

Vision−Language

Production deployment

Distributed training

Education

MS minimum

PhD preferred

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

JAX

ONNX/TensorRT

Job description

PlusAI, a Physical AI company, seeks experts to advance Vision-Language-Action models for autonomous trucking. You will own data, architecture, and large-scale training, moving models from research to production on on-board compute.

The role requires MS with PhD preferred in related fields, and 3+ years in deep learning model training. Experience with PyTorch/TensorFlow/JAX is expected.