Staff/Lead Machine Learning Engineer, Behavior and Planning

Nuro; Mountain View (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Nuro is hiring a staff or lead ML engineer for Behavior and Planning. You will own technical leadership on models that shape how the Nuro Driver predicts, decides, plans, and generalizes across geographies and vehicle platforms.

You will work on foundation and world models, LLM/VLM reasoning, reinforcement and imitation learning, diffusion models, and transformer-based prediction and planning. The goal is to move from research ideas onto real vehicles while ensuring safety and scalability.

Qualifications

• Senior technical leadership experience building and deploying ML systems.
• Strong ML foundations across model architectures, training, and evaluation.
• Background in robotics, AI, machine learning, or related technical fields.
• Experience with sequential decision making, prediction, generative modeling, or reinforcement learning.

Responsibilities

• Lead ML initiatives across prediction, decision making, and planning
• Train and productionize models for safe, natural driving behavior
• Build behavior systems that generalize across cities and vehicle platforms
• Partner with perception, simulation, evaluation, ML infrastructure, and autonomy teams

Skills

Leadership

ML foundations

Sequential decision making

Robotics background

Job description

What the role actually is

Nuro is hiring a staff or lead ML engineer for Behavior and Planning. The role owns technical leadership on models that shape how the Nuro Driver predicts, decides, plans, and generalizes across new geographies and vehicle platforms.

The posting calls out foundation and world models, LLM/VLM reasoning, reinforcement and imitation learning, diffusion models, and transformer-based prediction and planning. The important part is that the work is meant to move from research ideas onto real vehicles.

What you would work on

• Lead ML initiatives across prediction, decision making, and planning
• Train and productionize models for safe, natural driving behavior
• Build behavior systems that generalize across cities and vehicle platforms
• Partner with perception, simulation, evaluation, ML infrastructure, and autonomy teams

What they are asking for

• Senior technical leadership experience building and deploying ML systems
• Strong ML foundations across model architectures, training, and evaluation
• Background in robotics, AI, machine learning, or related technical fields
• Experience with sequential decision making, prediction, generative modeling, or reinforcement learning

Why this one is worth a look

Behavior and planning is where autonomy becomes legible to people on the road. This role is worth watching because it joins frontier ML methods with the messy product question of whether a robot's choices feel safe, predictable, and scalable.