Vision-Language Architect & Research Lead

Aurora; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 247,000 - 396,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Annual bonus

Equity compensation

Hybrid work arrangement

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

Aurora is seeking a PhD-level AI researcher to advance Vision-Language-Action architectures. You will explore VLM/VLA designs, mentor engineers, and translate theory into scalable, production-ready implementations for high-performance computing environments.

Join us in a hybrid setup with world-class infrastructure, contributing to safe, efficient self-driving technology. Compensation includes base salary, annual bonus, and equity.

Qualifications

• PhD in AI, CS, or Robotics; top-tier research lab background.
• Deep expertise in Vision-Language Models (VLM) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA).
• Hands-on with jagged edges—knowing where current architectures fail and how to troubleshoot them.
• Translate complex papers into production-ready code.
• Willing to mentor team members and bridge knowledge gaps.
• Excited by large-scale infrastructure and supercomputing environments (Aurora).
• Architectural creativity to rethink model architectures, not just fine-tuning.
• Strong Python programming skills.
• Proficiency in modern C++.

Responsibilities

• Architectural Exploration: Deep dive into VLM/VLA architectures for our problem sets.
• Technical Mentorship: Guide for an engineering team entering this space.
• Practical Implementation: Bridge theory to scalable applications.
• Innovation: Redesign and optimize model architectures for HPC environments like Aurora.

Skills

Python

C++

Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language-Action

Mentorship

Education

PhD in AI/CS/Robotics

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Job description

Aurora is seeking a PhD-level AI researcher to advance Vision-Language-Action architectures. You will explore VLM/VLA designs, mentor engineers, and translate theory into scalable, production-ready implementations for high-performance computing environments.

Join us in a hybrid setup with world-class infrastructure, contributing to safe, efficient self-driving technology. Compensation includes base salary, annual bonus, and equity.