Staff AI Autonomy Engineer - Edge ML & Multimodal Vision

Archer; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 195,000 - 235,000; Full time

Job summary

Archer is an aerospace company in San Jose, CA, seeking a Staff Engineer, AI Autonomy to lead building and deploying vision-language and VLA models for Archer's all-electric eVTOL aircraft. You will transform prototypes into edge-enabled components while collaborating with Safety and Simulation Engineers to ensure real-world performance.

You will push state-of-the-art in multimodal perception and navigation, balancing latency, power, and accuracy as you scale models from prototype to deployed

Qualifications

• 8+ years of related experience in ML/AI for autonomy.
• MS/PhD or equivalent in CS/Robotics; exceptional BS considered.
• Hands-on with vision-language or VLA models.
• Strong transformer/multimodal model knowledge.
• Proficient in PyTorch; experience with model-serving integration.
• Experience bringing models from prototype to deployed systems.
• Comfort with ambiguity and unscoped programs.

Responsibilities

• Develop and integrate multi-model systems including VLN/VLA, perception and language models.
• Design benchmarks and report comparisons against baselines.
• Fine-tune and adapt foundation models to new domains.
• Validate through data-driven testing in simulation, hardware, and flight tests.
• Deploy and monitor edge-run components under latency and power constraints.

Skills

8+ years of experience

MS or PhD

Vision-language models

Transformer architectures

PyTorch

Model serving end-to-end

0→1 product development

Ambiguity tolerance

Education

MS/PhD in CS or Robotics

Tools

Edge deployment platforms

Job description

Archer is an aerospace company in San Jose, CA, seeking a Staff Engineer, AI Autonomy to lead building and deploying vision-language and VLA models for Archer's all-electric eVTOL aircraft. You will transform prototypes into edge-enabled components while collaborating with Safety and Simulation Engineers to ensure real-world performance.

You will push state-of-the-art in multimodal perception and navigation, balancing latency, power, and accuracy as you scale models from prototype to deployed