Senior Vision-Language AI Researcher for Autonomous Driving

Plus 2; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Catered free lunch, unlimited snacks L

Highly competitive salary and benefits

Job summary

PlusAI, a Silicon Valley-based Physical AI company, is pushing the frontiers of autonomous trucking with AI-based virtual driver software. Join our core AI team to build Vision-Language-Action models that guide on-board decisions and trajectory planning.

You will own a VLA workstream end-to-end—from data and architecture to large-scale training and in-vehicle validation—while collaborating with perception, planning, and platform teams to deploy models to production.

Qualifications

• M.S. minimum, Ph.D. preferred in CS, EE, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field.
• 3+ years implementing and training models in a deep learning framework.
• Hands-on experience training vision-language / vision-language-action models.
• Hands-on experience with model 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 for PlusAI'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-Action (VLA)

PyTorch / TensorFlow / JAX

Distributed training

On-vehicle deployment

SFT / RL post-training

Autonomous driving / ADAS

Education

MS minimum, PhD preferred in CS/EE/Math/Stats

Tools

ONNX/TensorRT

CUDA

Distributed training infra

Job description

PlusAI, a Silicon Valley-based Physical AI company, is pushing the frontiers of autonomous trucking with AI-based virtual driver software. Join our core AI team to build Vision-Language-Action models that guide on-board decisions and trajectory planning.

You will own a VLA workstream end-to-end—from data and architecture to large-scale training and in-vehicle validation—while collaborating with perception, planning, and platform teams to deploy models to production.