Senior Vision-Language-Action Engineer, Autonomous Driving

Socket.dev; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Catered lunch

Unlimited snacks and beverages

401(k) plan

Job summary

PlusAI, a Physical AI company pioneering AI-based virtual driver software for factory-built autonomous trucks, invites talented researchers to join its core AI team in Silicon Valley.

You will train Vision-Language-Action models that generate high-level driving decisions and trajectory guidance for on-board decision-making, collaborating across perception, planning, and platform teams to bring models from research to production.

Qualifications

• MS minimum, PhD preferred in CS, EE, Mathematics, Statistics, or 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 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.

Responsibilities

• 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

Skills

Vision-Language

DL Frameworks

Distributed Training

Education

MS or PhD in CS/EE/Math

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

JAX

ONNX/TensorRT

Job description

PlusAI, a Physical AI company pioneering AI-based virtual driver software for factory-built autonomous trucks, invites talented researchers to join its core AI team in Silicon Valley.

You will train Vision-Language-Action models that generate high-level driving decisions and trajectory guidance for on-board decision-making, collaborating across perception, planning, and platform teams to bring models from research to production.