Senior/Staff Research Engineer — Vision-Language-Action Models (Autonomous Driving)

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PlusAI is seeking a Senior or Staff Research Engineer to build Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for autonomous trucking. The role focuses on training large multimodal reasoning models and optimizing them for on-board vehicle compute through distillation and compression techniques.

• Design, train, and evaluate VLA models for high-level driving decisions and trajectory guidance.
• Own end-to-end VLA workstreams including data, architecture, large-scale training, and on-vehicle validation.
• Develop model distillation and compression recipes to deploy large models on edge hardware.
• Apply SFT and RL post-training to improve model robustness and long-tail behavior.

• M.S. minimum, Ph.D. preferred in CS, EE, Math, or related field.
• 3+ years experience with deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX).
• Direct hands-on experience training vision-language or VLA models.
• Experience with large-scale distributed model training and production deployment.

• Experience with model quantization, ONNX/TensorRT optimization, and custom kernels.