Staff VLA Engineer - Pioneering Autonomous Driving AI

42dot; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 189,000 - 311,000; Full time

Job summary

42dot, a mobility AI company and Hyundai Motor Group's Global Software Center, seeks a Staff VLA Engineer to advance next-generation autonomous driving intelligence, focusing on foundation models, multimodal learning, and world-model reasoning.

You will prototype architectures that unify perception, planning, and action, and collaborate across Silicon Valley and HQ Korea while contributing to research-to-deployment pipelines.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, Electrical Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).
• Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, JAX).
• Strong understanding of foundation models, multimodal learning, or transformer-based architectures.
• Experience training or fine-tuning large-scale models (vision, language, or multimodal).
• Strong software engineering skills and experience with large-scale data pipelines.
• Ability to read, implement, and extend ideas from recent AI research papers.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills across distributed, cross-functional teams (Silicon Valley + HQ Korea).

Responsibilities

• Contribute to Next-Generation VLA Architectures.
• Research scalable multimodal foundation models for autonomous driving.
• Help develop architectures with improved generalization, reasoning, and long-horizon decision making.
• Support work on large driving models that unify perception, planning, and action generation.
• Build and experiment with world-model-based approaches for predictive driving intelligence.
• Work on future-state prediction, behavior forecasting, and counterfactual simulation.
• Contribute to long-horizon planning and reasoning research for autonomous driving.
• Help build models that understand complex traffic interactions and latent agent intentions.
• Research goal-driven autonomous driving agents and adaptive decision making in open-world environments.

Skills

Foundation models

Multimodal learning

Transformer architectures

Large-scale model training

Reading AI papers

Software engineering

Distributed collaboration

Education

MS or PhD in CS/Robotics/ML/EE

Tools

PyTorch

JAX

Job description

42dot, a mobility AI company and Hyundai Motor Group's Global Software Center, seeks a Staff VLA Engineer to advance next-generation autonomous driving intelligence, focusing on foundation models, multimodal learning, and world-model reasoning.

You will prototype architectures that unify perception, planning, and action, and collaborate across Silicon Valley and HQ Korea while contributing to research-to-deployment pipelines.