Staff AI/ML Software Engineer, Model Distillation & Fine-Tuning

General Motors; Mountain View (CA); Hybrid; USD 189,000 - 291,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Company vehicle program

Relocation benefits

Job summary

General Motors in Mountain View, CA is seeking a Staff AI/ML Software Engineer to lead adaptation and distillation of foundation models for automotive edge deployment. You will design parameter-efficient fine-tuning, curate datasets, and drive end-to-end model optimization for cabin understanding and multimodal perception.

Join the Vehicle Applied AI team to shape practical, edge-ready ML solutions, coordinating with hardware teams to ensure reliable performance on constrained compute while

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, ML, Data Science, Mathematics, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of software engineering or applied ML research experience.
• Deep proficiency in PyTorch.
• Hands-on fine-tuning of large language models or vision-language models.
• Experience with knowledge distillation, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, pruning, or quantization.
• Hybrid work in Mountain View, CA or Seattle, WA with three days in office weekly.

Responsibilities

• Design distillation pipelines to transfer reasoning from foundation models to edge-ready architectures.
• Apply parameter-efficient fine-tuning like LoRA/QLoRA for cabin interaction models.
• Lead RLHF and RL loops with in-cabin data for continuous improvement.
• Curate and generate datasets to teach smaller models passenger intent and visuals.
• Implement quantization-aware training to keep accuracy after compression.
• Define evaluation benchmarks for finetuned models focusing on hallucination and safety.
• Decide base model strategy and when to switch architectures.

Skills

PyTorch

LLM fine-tuning

Vision-language models

Knowledge distillation

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning

Pruning

Quantization

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science/related field

Job description

Job Description Work Arrangement:

This role is categorized as hybrid. This means the successful candidate is expected to report to Mountain View, CA three times per week at minimum or other frequency dictated by the business. The Role General Motors is bringing multimodal AI into the vehicle, and we are looking for a Staff AI/ML Software Engineer to lead the adaptation, fine-tuning, and distillation of foundation models for the automotive edge. You will build models that understand driver intent, conversational context, passenger requests, and the visual state of the cabin. Large, general-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) and LLMs are highly capable, but their size makes them impractical to run on constrained vehicle compute. Slicing them down naively degrades exactly the reasoning and multimodal ability that made them worth deploying. Solving that is the core of this job. You will join Vehicle Applied AI, the team that identifies, validates, and de-risks the AI capabilities that will define our future vehicles. We prove feasibility on representative vehicle hardware and chart a practical path to scale. As an individual contributor technical leader, you will set the architectural direction for our model optimization pipelines. You will take the lead on parameter-efficient fine-tuning, dataset curation for complex human-machine interaction use cases, and teacher-student knowledge distillation. You will connect foundation model research with practical deployment, ensuring your models understand the cabin environment, improve through continuous data loops, and perform reliably after edge quantization. If you are a strong ML practitioner focused on maximizing the "intelligence per parameter" of compact models, this is the role for you.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build the knowledge distillation pipelines that transfer reasoning, vision, and language capability from foundation models into compact architectures suitable for edge deployment.
• Apply and scale parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques (LoRA, QLoRA, or similar) to adapt general-purpose models to specific cabin interaction and conversational AI use cases.
• Build and own the reinforcement learning flywheel, implementing human-in-the-loop alignment (RLHF/DPO) and closing the loop between in-cabin data collection and continuous model improvement.
• Curate, evaluate, and synthetically generate the datasets required to teach smaller models to accurately interpret passenger intent and complex visual cues inside the vehicle.
• Implement Quantization-Aware Training or similar techniques, adjusting model architectures and training regimes to prevent accuracy degradation when models are compressed for hardware deployment.
• Establish the evaluation frameworks and benchmarks for fine-tuned models, measuring hallucination rates, domain accuracy, and safety constraints.
• Own our base model strategy: decide which foundation architectures we build on, and make the case for switching when something better arrives.

Your Skills & Abilities (Required Qualifications)

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, Mathematics, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of software engineering or applied ML research experience, including work where you set the technical direction others built against, made the architectural calls on an ML system, and brought other engineers along with you.
• Deep proficiency in PyTorch.
• Hands-on experience fine-tuning large language models or vision-language models, with results you can speak to in detail.
• Practical experience with at least two of: knowledge distillation, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, pruning, or quantization.
• Based in or willing to work hybrid out of Mountain View, CA or Seattle, WA, reporting to the office three days per week at minimum.

What Can Give You a Competitive Advantage (Preferred Qualifications)

• Master's degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field.
• Experience shipping a quantized model to a specific hardware target, including working through the accuracy regressions that surfaced along the way.
• Familiarity with the broader training ecosystem (Hugging Face, DeepSpeed, Ray, or Megatron) and experience managing dataset pipelines at scale.
• Domain experience in conversational AI, human-computer interaction, smart spaces, or deploying multimodal models in consumer-facing products.
• Open-source contributions to foundation model tuning libraries, or published research on model compression, distillation, or efficient AI.
• Ability to communicate complex AI training concepts and architectural trade-offs to cross-functional product and engineering teams.

Compensation

The compensation information is a good faith estimate only. It is based on what a successful applicant might be paid in accordance with applicable state laws. The compensation may not be representative for positions located outside of the California Bay Area. The salary range for this role is ($189,300 - $290,700). The actual base salary a successful candidate will be offered within this range will vary based on factors relevant to the position.

Bonus Potential

An incentive pay program offers payouts based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.

Company Vehicle

Upon successful completion of a motor vehicle report review, you will be eligible to participate in a company vehicle evaluation program, through which you will be assigned a General Motors vehicle to drive and evaluate. Note: program participants are required to purchase/lease a qualifying GM vehicle every four years unless one of a limited number of exceptions applies.

This Job may be eligible for relocation benefits.

Eligible for relocation benefits.

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