Vision-Language-Action AI Engineer for Autonomous Driving

Plusai; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 170,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Catered free lunch

Unlimited snacks and beverages

401(k) plan

Job summary

PlusAI is seeking a talented AI/ML researcher to design, train and deploy Vision-Language-Action models for autonomous trucks. The role focuses on high-level driving decisions, trajectory guidance, and on-vehicle validation across perception, planning and platform teams.

You will own a VLA workstream end-to-end, build robust pipelines, and push state-of-the-art methods into production with distillation and post-training enhancements.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in CS/EE/Math/Stats or 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 that generate high-level driving decisions and trajectory guidance in support of Plus'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

MS/PhD in CS/EE/Math/Stats

3+ years DL model training

Vision-Language / VLA models

PyTorch TensorFlow JAX

Production deployment experience

Education

MS or PhD in CS/EE/Math/Stats or related field

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

JAX

Job description

PlusAI is seeking a talented AI/ML researcher to design, train and deploy Vision-Language-Action models for autonomous trucks. The role focuses on high-level driving decisions, trajectory guidance, and on-vehicle validation across perception, planning and platform teams.

You will own a VLA workstream end-to-end, build robust pipelines, and push state-of-the-art methods into production with distillation and post-training enhancements.